Active Participation Quotes

The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped - it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Your obligation is that of active participation. You should not act as knowledge-absorbing sponges, but as whetstones on which we can all sharpen our wits ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

Active participation is an engaging exchange of information. ~ Asa Don Brown

Different people define "the good life" in different ways. To me, the good life includes active participation in family, church and community. It means making time for playing with kids, teaching them important religious and moral principles in the home, going to church with them and spending enough time with them that they know you care. It requires being a partner with your spouse, allowing him or her to grow in her own right, to spread her wings and fly. It includes participating in the community -- committees, service, voting, perhaps public office. It means having enough financial base that there is some flexibility in life, without which the previous activities just described are very limited. ~ Kenneth Ross French

The point was that the 'continual toil' and want of leisure of the majority of the population would automatically exclude them from active participation in government though, of course, not from being represented and from choosing their representatives. But representation is no more than a matter of 'self-preservation' or self-interest, necessary to protect the lives of the labourers and to shield them against the encroachment of government; these essentially negative safeguards by no means open the political realm to the many, nor can they arouse in them that 'passion for distinction' - the 'desire not only to equal or resemble, but to excel' - which, according to John Adams, 'next to self-preservation will forever be the great spring of human actions'. Hence the predicament of the poor after their self-preservation has been assured is that their lives are without consequence, and that they remain excluded from the light of the public realm where excellence can shine; ~ Hannah Arendt

In a scheduled world, you are told you have half an hour to peruse an exhibit at the museum; in a programmed world, you are strapped into the ride at Disneyland and conveyed through the experience at a predetermined pace. However richly conceived, the ride's complexity is limited because its features are built-in, appearing and unfolding in sync with the motions of your cart. The skeleton dangles, the pirate waves, and the holographic ship emerges from the cloud of smoke. In the programmed life, the lights go on and off at a specified time, the coffee pot activates, the daylight-balanced bulb in the programmable clock radio fades up. Active participation is optional, for these events will go on without us and at their own pace. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there's an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. ~ Lewis Buzbee

As a father, I believe that involving children in sports at a young age is generally, a wise proposition. I believe that healthy competition is ... well ... healthy; that sporting events foster a spirit of teamwork that far surpasses the events themselves; and that active participation keeps children moving and is good for their self-esteem. ~ Naveen Jain

Literacy unlocks the door to learning throughout life, is essential to development and health, and opens the way for democratic participation and active citizenship. ~ Kofi Annan

A month has passed since I've written, but it has seemed to pass much more slowly. Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part. I simply drift along like the messages I write you. I do not know where I am going or when I will get there.

Even work does not take the pain away. I may be diving for my own pleasure or showing others how to do so, but when I return to the shop, it seems empty without you. I stock and order as I always did, but even now, I sometimes glance over my shoulder without thinking and call for you. As I write this note to you, I wonder when, or if, things like that will ever stop.

Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it is an impossibility, but I cannot help myself. My search for you is a never-ending quest that is doomed to fail. You and I had talked about what would happen if we were forced apart by circumstance, but I cannot keep the promise I made to you that night. I am sorry, my darling, but there will never be another to replace you. The words I whispered to you were folly, and I should have realized it then. You - and you alone - have always been the only thing I wanted, and now that you are gone, I have no desire to find another. Till death do us part, we whispered, and I've come to believe that t ~ Nicholas Sparks

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence. ~ Walker Percy

Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively. ~ Sandor Ellix Katz

Women in the Arab world have a rich history in their active participation in political change from the Algeria revolution against the French occupation to the most recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya among other countries. The question is not their participation. Their question is the incorporation of women's voices fully in the new definitions of the countries where change has happened. ~ Zainab Salbi

Within a lot of African-American households, I think, there's an idea that black men don't want to take an active participation in the lives of their children. That if they do, there has to be some sort of ulterior motive. ~ Gabrielle Union

Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The ancient voices that speak in Scripture evoke an ongoing dialogue that requires our active participation. Their sacred conversation about life in God's presence begs to be continued among believers today, for the fact of the matter is, the Bible is not self-interpreting. It is a living word through which God continues to meet us and speak to us in our own particular historical moment, and thus it demands to be newly interpreted for new historical situations. And interpretation is not simply reiteration of the text, repeating what was said before, but the hard work of bringing it into our own time and place. So every new generation of believers must join the interpretive conversation as it experiences the living God in relation to new circumstances. ~ Frances Taylor Gench

Both children and adults acquire knowledge from active participation in holistic, complex, meaningful environments organized around long-term goals. Today's school programs could hardly have been better designed to prevent a child's natural learning system from operating. ~ Sylvia Farnham-Diggory

The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which ... lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life. ~ Alain Danielou

Though government has an important role to play in meeting the many challenges that remain before us, we are coming to understand that no organization, including government, will fully succeed without the active participation of each of us. Volunteers are vital to enabling this country to live up to the true promise of its heritage ~ William J. Clinton

Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part ... I do not know where I am going or when I will get there. ~ Nicholas Sparks

We do not understand democracy in its bourgeois meaning
of babbling, lack of discipline, anarchy. We understand democracy as the active participation of the citizens in formulating and implementing the Party's policy. ~ Nicolae Ceausescu

If we are to make poverty history, we must have the active participation of States, civil society and the private sector, as well as individual volunteers. ~ Kofi Annan

Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone 'offers' to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you - not just once every few years on things you haven't got a chance in hell of affecting. ~ Daniel Suarez

...I was more than just the sum of my experiences, and I had the ability to become an active participant in life instead of just standing on the sidelines. ~ S.H. Kolee

Literally, this is what enthios means - it is the root of enthusiastic - enthusiasmos means having the god/s within, thus becoming god-filled, or one with the god and in a state of participation mystique. ~ Erin Sullivan

I would like to be more active outside of Israel. ~ Ofra Strauss

I have grown tired of the notion of an ally. I prefer the language of an "accomplice." An ally loves you from a distance. An accomplice loves you up close. We need allies to make the transition to accomplices. An ally is someone who has unpacked her personal privilege but hasn't yet made the link to institutional issues and is not willing to risk anything besides her mental comfort. An accomplice rolls up her sleeves and engages in the work that is beyond her. She'll march in the streets, yes. But an accomplice also faces her own participation in whiteness, acknowledges it, and then looks beyond that personal acknowledgment to identify how her awareness can be applied to changing the systems and mindsets that prop up the system. ~ DeRay Mckesson

God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. ~ Swami Vivekananda

This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects. ~ Clay Shirky

In fact, our brains are most active, and hungriest, in the first few years of life. Even as adults, our brains use a lot of energy: when you just sit still, about 20 percent of your calories go to your brain. One-year-olds use much more than that, and by four, fully 66 percent of calories go to the brain, more than at any other period of development. In fact, the physical growth of children slows down in early childhood to compensate for the explosive activity of their brains. ~ Alison Gopnik

The challenge of this age is to resist and conquer in each of our own beings the racist brainwashing that is still active in our minds. ~ Wyatt Tee Walker

Did my moral upbrining somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing- then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn't stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Briefly, the mentality of the plant-men in every age was an expression of the varying tension between the two sides of their nature, between the active assertive, objectively inquisitive, and morally positive animal nature and the passive subjectively contemplative and devoutly acquiescent vegetable state nature. ~ Olaf Stapledon

Simple active work and spiritual activity are not the same thing. Active work can actually be the counterfeit of spiritual activity. The real danger in spiritual laziness is that we do not want to be stirred up - all we want to hear about is a spiritual retirement from the world. Yet Jesus Christ never encourages the idea of retirement - He says, "Go and tell My brethren . . ." (Matthew 28:10). ~ Oswald Chambers

When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn't actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business. ~ Gary Keller

most important distinction in the investment world does not separate individuals and institutions; the most important distinction divides those investors with the ability to make high quality active management decisions from those investors without active management expertise. Few institutions and even fewer individuals exhibit the ability and commit the resources to produce risk-adjusted excess returns. ~ David F. Swensen

Future generations will look back at the time we are living in now. The kind of future they look from, and the story they tell about our period, will be shaped by choices we make in our lifetimes. The most telling choice of all may well be the story we live from and see ourselves participating in. It sets the context of our lives in a way that influences all our other decisions.

In choosing our story, we not only cast our vote of influence over the kind of world future generations inherit, but we also affect our own lives in the here and now. When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do. When we move in a direction that touches our heart, we add to the momentum of deeper purpose that makes us feel more alive. A great story and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that moves toward meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains and losses. The Great Turning is such a story. ~ Joanna Macy And Chris Johnstone

Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Common participation in the Eucharist can only be a final outcome of ecumenic dialogue, not the starting point. ~ Karl Lehmann

It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors in life's stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which they chose to deem higher and more important. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I'm a born-again Christian. I was raised Episcopalian - I've always been of a Christian faith, but I became much more active in it when I married my first husband, Marvin. I changed from Episcopalian to Baptist. ~ Natalie Cole

Aristotle thought place should "take precedence of all other things" because place gives order to the world. Casey tells us that Aristotle claimed that place "gives bountiful aegis - active protective support - to what it locates. ~ Anonymous

When we are comfortable, we remain relaxed, however, when we see trouble coming, we take our active position ~ Sunday Adelaja

You can be active with the activists or sleep in with the sleepers while you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards. ~ Billy Bragg

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator. ~ Karl Marx

Don't just tell your kids to be active and to get outside and play. Lead by example. ~ Summer Sanders

I'm pretty active anyway, but I'm also competitive.I used my Fitbit as an example of the innate power of data to turn information into insights and actions. ~ Michael Dell

Reasonable ideas which find their sanction in the conscience of the righteous do not die; they are consequently realities and active forces, but they are so only to the extent that those who profess them know how to turn them to account. ~ Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

The reduced sense of responsibility and the absence of effective volition in turn explain the ordinary citizen's ignorance and lack of judgement in matters of domestic and foreign policy which are if anything more shocking in the case of educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life than it is with uneducated people in humble stations. ~ Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Man's conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that "existence" depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Because of the active principle and spirit or universal soul, nothing is so incomplete, defective or imperfect, or, according to common opinion, so completely insignificant that it could not become the source of great events. ~ Giordano Bruno

Good is latent in every living thing and simply needs to be called into active expression through the gracious application of respect, sympathetic understanding, gentleness and love. ~ J. Boone

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

There are more than one hundred strains of HPV in existence, thirteen of which cause cervical, anal, oral, and penile cancer - today, around 90 percent of all sexually active adults become infected with at least one strain during their lifetimes. ~ Rebecca Skloot

Another notable difference between these
fables and their Muggle counterparts is that
Beedle's witches are much more active in seeking their fortunes than our fairy-tale heroines. Asha, Altheda, Amata and Babbitty Rabbitty are all witches who take their fate into their own hands, rather than taking a prolonged nap or waiting for someone to return a lost shoe. ~ J.K. Rowling

Active waiting means present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. ~ Henri Nouwen

It is in full unity with Himself that He is also – and especially and above all – in Christ, that he becomes a creature, man, flesh, that He enters into our being in contradiction, that He takes upon Himself its consequences. If we think that this is impossible it is because our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human – far too human. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and perverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea about God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to constitute them in the light of the fact that He does this. We may believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be the "Wholly Other." But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do t ~ Karl Barth

Now, I think our prophet today is telling all of us, in this day and time, to go and bring in those people who are out on the plains. Each worthy young man should go on a mission. And each one of us, though we may not be called to active missionary service, can be on a mission and be involved in a cause that is greater than we are, the greatest cause of all in the world: the salvation of each of our Father's children. ~ James E. Faust

The narrow gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today's
wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written.
Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale. ~ Marty Neumeier

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman. ~ Claire Danes

My mother was a very positive thinker; she was always active, always doing something good. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

No one who knows my personal situation would think I am not sympathetic to the needs of the active forces. ~ Kit Bond

The battle against the devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the devil is still alive and active in the world. ~ Pope John Paul II

My top priority for 2012 will be to make a renewed push for women's economic empowerment and political participation. ~ Michelle Bachelet

An active civil position makes a Christian strong as the image of God ~ Sunday Adelaja

Barbara Castle was a hero to millions of British women. She inspired a new generation of women to become active in Labour politics, including, of course Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman. ~ Patricia Hewitt

Living is a creative and active process of diligent learning that entails industrious human action, attentive awareness, and thoughtful reflection. Learning is one facet of human beings innate capacity that can provide a sense of worthiness to human life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster