Abram Onkgopotse Tiro Quotes

Pharmaceutical companies are very annoyed with niacin because their products have to compete with it. Some of their cholesterol-lowering drugs cost up to $150 a month while niacin costs about $10. ~ Abram Hoffer

I tried to close my ears to the strange worshipful chanting and fix my mind on God, but the Egyptians' idolatry weighed down my weary shoulders and brought tears to my closed eyes. ~ Kristen Reed

Now m the LORD said [1] to Abram, "Go from your country [2] and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 n And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 o I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and p in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." [3] ~ Anonymous

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue. ~ David Abram

A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are. ~ David Abram

Fiercely intelligent, yet bearing a sensibility far more porous than most, Van Gogh was unable, or unwilling, to abstract his intellect from his body's reality, unwilling to abandon the myriad things, to tame his senses and so stifle the steady eros between his flesh and the flesh of the earth.

"Again and again he slides out of himself, through his eyes, to feel the hunkard silence of the olive groves, and to taste the spreading ecstasy of the leaves as they're slowly lit by the climbing sun. And again and again he is invaded, in turn, by the visible -- penetrated by the midday langor of the rolling wheat fields, or by the sullen mood of a neighbor's face. Although he writes often to his brother and a few friends (letters of luminous candor and kindness), it is only in the act of drawing and painting that he is able to give expression to this ongoing intercourse, by offering back to the visible a trace of what the visible steadily pours into his chest.

"His paintings, then, are windows through which we look onto an earth no less alive and intelligent than ourselves ~ David Abram

What are the only weapons I possess, Tiro?" he asked me, and then he answered his own question. "These." he said, gesturing at his books. "Words. Caesar and Pompey have their soldiers, Crassus his wealth, Clodius his bullies on the street. My only legions are my words. By language I rose, and by language I shall survive. ~ Robert Harris

Truth is irrefutable and untainted by bias. Sunrise, Abram, death: these are truths. ~ Nora Sakavic

Freedom of choice comes at the price of intermittent insanity. ~ Abram Gitspof

The politics of that year [2004] are old now, but the problem remains the same, the real culture clash of American life. It's between the essence of fundamentalism - paternalism, authority, and charity - and the messy imperatives of democracy, "the din of the vox populi" once derided by Abram Vereide. It's the difference between false unity, preached from above, and real solidarity, pledged between brothers and sisters - the kinds who are always bickering. ~ Jeff Sharlet

Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name ("the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face"). ~ Robert Harris

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land. ~ David Abram

Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it. ~ David Abram

I work with people like Spielberg and Abrams all the time. ~ Gabriel Basso

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. ~ David Abram

What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world! ~ David Abram

Those who reinforce the disintegrating elements in our society will get no thanks from future generations. The family becomes the ultimate victim of homosexuality, a result which any society can tolerate only within certain limits.

If the American Psychiatric Association endorses one of the symptoms of social distress as a normal phenomenon it demonstrates to the public its ignorance of social dynamics, of the relation of personal maladaptation to social disharmony, and thereby acquires a responsibility for aggravating the already existing chaos.
[response to December 15, 1973 verdict] ~ Abram Kardiner

Half-way there, a touch of his normal common sense returned to him and he slowed down, wondering what exchange of courtesies he was going to offer a vagabond, an Abram man, or an idiot. Then the man turned his head and Richard saw that he was none of these things. That the frieze cloak he wore was rich, and fell back from the silk of a high-collared tunic; that his hair, flicked by the wind, was yellow as mustard and the shadowless face, faintly engraved upon and tired as cered linen, was indeed that of Francis his brother.

Lymond did not move. His head lifted, watching, showed no conventional welcome; his brows, cloudily drawn, suggested the weight of something so firmly extinguished that nothing was left, in thought or expression, save a curious air, part of resignation, part of defiance which had to do, perhaps, with his stillness. Only the edge of his cloak stirred tardily, with his inaudible breathing. His parted lips closing, Richard Crawford came to a halt and stood, looking down at his brother.

'There is not a soul but over it is a keeper,' Lymond said. 'Welcome, brother.' ~ Dorothy Dunnett

And he blessed him and said: "Blessed [favored with blessings, made blissful, joyful] be Abram of God Most High, Possessor [and Maker] of heaven and earth" (Genesis 14:19). ~ John Crowder

It couldn't be true. She'd finally put her guard down, tried to trust in someone other than her mother and Abram. She'd finally found someone to love. It couldn't be. God couldn't be so cruel. ~ Taryn Browning

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community - the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself - are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking - ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world. ~ David Abram

It is the responsibility of good people to rise against bad rulers. ~ Abram Gitspof

I only subpoena folks for jury duty that I know will be fair... ~ Paul Henry Abram

He sure does fall asleep a lot. Must be the Paxil. he takes his pill and a half hour later it's like he's roofied himself. ~ Jay Clark

The day I fall in love with you for real will be the same day they open up a ski resort in Hell."

"Splendid. That can be our first date." He flashed me a grin which, even in the dark, managed to sparkle. ~ Amanda Abram

18 So that day Jehovah made this covenant with Abram: "I have given this land to your descendants from the Wadi-el-Arish[*] to the Euphrates River. 19-21 And I give to them these nations: Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites. ~ Anonymous

Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public. ~ Abram Hoffer

Oh, Abram. Please don't waste energy on this. Haters gonna hate, idiots gonna procreate. ~ Penny Reid

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air. ~ David Abram

He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusion
a distraction ~ Jennifer DeLucy

Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war. ~ Jonathan Evison

When God promised Abram that he would make his name great, he was already known as Abram (exalted father) by many who were close to him. It follows then that the name Abram was not the "great" name God had promised to bestow upon him. But something very supernatural happened to the spiritual matrix of his name when he met Melchizedek in the Valley of Shaveh. ~ Francis Myles

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. ~ David Abram

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys. ~ David Abram

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling. ~ David Abram

I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think i behaved in a paltry manner (Charles Darwin) ~ Abram Kardiner

Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. ~ David Abram

I pretended not to be surprised when she showed up at my sliding door last night. Between the dog and me? I thought she was either a super-dedicated UPS guy or a polite serial killer. ~ Jay Clark

To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions. ~ David Abram

Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper rapport with the beings around us, or of calling the living land into resonance with us. It is a power we still brush up against whenever we use our words to bless and to curse, or to charm someone we're drawn to. But we wield such eloquence only to sway other people, and so we miss the greater magnetism, the gravitational power that lies within such speech. The beaver gliding across the pond, the fungus gripping a thick trunk, a boulder shattered by its tumble down a cliff or the rain splashing upon those granite fragments -- we talk about such beings, the weather and the weathered stones, but we do not talk to them.

Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. We've lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us. ~ David Abram

If the patient has been to more than four physicians, nutrition is probably the medical answer. ~ Abram Hoffer