Favorite Quotations
- Thread starter annabenedetti
- Start date
theophilus
Well-known member
On doors:
If you haven't been able to be happy, maybe it's because you're holding firmly to your idea of happiness. Release that idea, and happiness can come more easily. Imagine that there are many doors that open to happiness. If you open every door, then happiness has many ways to come to you. But the situation is that you have closed all the doors except one, and that is why happiness can't come. So don't close any doors. Open all the doors. Don't commit yourself to one idea of happiness. Release the idea of happiness that you have, and then happiness can come today. Many of us are caught in an idea about how we can truly be happy... sit down and reexamine your idea of happiness.
Thich Nhat Hanh
And a meme I came across recently:
Believe it or not, I never thought about it quite that way before. I needed to see that meme. :chuckle:
I heard it this way...
"When God closes one door He often opens another...even though sometimes it's Hell in the hallway."
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
Maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.
Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton
:thumb: I love a good quote, especially when it's coupled with an author name that makes me grin. . . Well, you know.
theophilus
Well-known member
I love Bonhoeffer. He was an amazing man.
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
So you must not be frightened… if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?
Rainer Maria Wilke
Rainer Maria Wilke
“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
Do not swim with the current that is carrying you.
Evoken
Evoken
theophilus
Well-known member
"Forgiveness is the fragrance the flower casts back upon the foot that crushed it." ~Unknown
Dillpickle27
New member
"You can never return home because home is a memory in your mind" Thomas Wolfe
Dillpickle27
New member
"Fear only exists in our minds it's not real it's a product of your imagination" Will Smith ,After Earth
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass against which his own me stands cut in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Cosmos in a different place.
William James
William James
Depends on the current. :e4e: With Evo, that philosophy led to a tragic outcome because it was too broadly applied. Sometimes we fall in love with our methodology at the expense of the point of adopting one.
Ask Mr. Religion
☞☞☞☞Presbyterian (PCA) 	
Gold Subscriber
LIFETIME MEMBER
Hall of Fame
Tragic indeed. Sigh.
AMR
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
Before Frederick Taylor introduced his system of scientific management, the individual laborer, drawing on his training, knowledge, and experience, would make his own decisions about how he did his work. He would write his own script. After Taylor, the laborer began following a script written by someone else. The machine operator was not expected to understand how the script was constructed or the reasoning behind it; he was simply expected to obey it. The messiness that comes with individual autonomy was cleaned up, and the factory as a whole became more efficient, its output more predictable, Industry prospered. What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine.
When we go online, we, too, are following scripts written by others - algorithmic instructions that few of us would be able to understand even if the hidden codes were revealed to us. When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we're following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we're following a script. When we choose from a list of categories to describe ourselves or our relationships on Facebook, we're following a script. These scripts can be ingenious and extraordinarily useful, as they were in the Taylorist factories, but they also mechanize the messy processes of intellectual exploration and even social attachment. As the computer programmer Thomas Lord has argued, software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless "rituals" whose steps are "encoded in the logic of web pages." Rather than acting according to our own knowledge and intuition, we go through the motions.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
When we go online, we, too, are following scripts written by others - algorithmic instructions that few of us would be able to understand even if the hidden codes were revealed to us. When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we're following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we're following a script. When we choose from a list of categories to describe ourselves or our relationships on Facebook, we're following a script. These scripts can be ingenious and extraordinarily useful, as they were in the Taylorist factories, but they also mechanize the messy processes of intellectual exploration and even social attachment. As the computer programmer Thomas Lord has argued, software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless "rituals" whose steps are "encoded in the logic of web pages." Rather than acting according to our own knowledge and intuition, we go through the motions.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
There is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street. The stimulations of the Net, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We wouldn't want to give them up. But they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily, as Hawthorne understood, overwhelm all quieter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thought and memories to a powerful electronic system, is the one that informs the fears of both the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.
It's not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It's also empathy and compassion. Psychologists have long studied how people experience fear and react to physical threats, but it's only recently that they've begun researching the sources of our nobler instincts. What they're finding out is that . . . the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that "are inherently slow." It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain "to transcend immediate involvement of the body" and begin to understand and to feel "the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation." . . . . The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
It's not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It's also empathy and compassion. Psychologists have long studied how people experience fear and react to physical threats, but it's only recently that they've begun researching the sources of our nobler instincts. What they're finding out is that . . . the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that "are inherently slow." It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain "to transcend immediate involvement of the body" and begin to understand and to feel "the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation." . . . . The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
