Building Blocks Quotes

What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Genes and education are fundamental building blocks with witch man develops personality and lifestyle in one way or other... ~ Monica Rus Carmen Psychologyst

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars. ~ Murray Gell-Mann

Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.
Walls.
A world completely surrounded by walls. ~ Haruki Murakami

Small unexpected acts of kindness are the building blocks of greatness. Start your day with a smile and see where it takes you ... ~ Edwin Lionel Flynn

Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don't understand the physics of software and it's rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people. Specifically, it's about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems. ~ Pieter Hintjens

It's all about having a product that you're proud of and coming to work every day. Those basic building blocks are the same in any business. ~ Greg Brenneman

Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she'd begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even - people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets - was made up of a combination of these elements. "Isn't it amazing to think of, Ruthie?" he'd asked. Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling - even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that. ~ Jennifer McMahon

On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations ... It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur ... If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space. ~ Christopher Alexander

Often the deep valleys of our PRESENT will be UNDERSTOOD only by LOOKING BACK on them from the mountains of our FUTURE experience. Often we can't see the LORD'S HAND in our lives until long after the trials have passed. Often the most difficult times of our lives are ESSENTIAL building blocks that form the FOUNDATION of our CHARACTER and pave the way to FUTURE opportunity, understanding, and happiness. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

The Z-particle Pure energy - no mass at all. It may well be the
smallest building block in nature. Matter is nothing but trapped energy. ~ Dan Brown

The result of mindful awareness is the development of our virtues, which are the basic positive building blocks of our life. ~ Janet Gallagher Nestor

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. ~ Fritjof Capra

Science in its everyday practice is much closer to art than to philosophy. When I look at Godel's proof of his undecidability theorem, I do not see a philosophical argument. The proof is a soaring piece of architecture, as unique and as lovely as Chartres Cathedral. Godel took Hilbert's formalized axioms of mathematics as his building blocks and built out of them a lofty structure of ideas into which he could finally insert his undecidable arithmetical statement as the keystone of the arch. The proof is a great work of art. It is a construction, not a reduction. It destroyed Hilbert's dream of reducing all mathematics to a few equations, and replaced it with a greater dream of mathematics as an endlessly growing realm of ideas. Godel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Every formalization of mathematics raises questions that reach beyond the limits of the formalism into unexplored territory. ~ Freeman Dyson

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me - because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home.

"What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now - these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and ~ Rowan Williams

Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. ~ Julian Assange

Sometimes consequences are building blocks fashioned of granite when successes are shaped of clay. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination. ~ Ayah Bdeir

The three processes - people, strategy, and operations - remain the building blocks and heart of good execution. ~ Ram Charan

The building blocks of mathematical thinking are requisite for more advanced conceptualization. If a student is not ready to move on, then the teacher must take time to assist that learner. ~ Heidi Hayes Jacobs

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks. ~ Warren Farrell

Nothing highlights better the continuing gap between rhetoric and substance in British financial services than the failure of providers here to emulate Jack Bogle's index fund success in the United States. Every professional in the City knows that index funds should be core building blocks in any long-term investor's portfolio. Since 1976, the Vanguard index funds has produced a compound annual return of 12 percent, better than three-quarters of its peer group. ~ Jonathan Davis

A lot of my building blocks - who I am kind of as an artist - all came from being in L.A. ~ Steve Aoki

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them. ~ Theodore Zeldin

Hendrix was back there with a few of the others who were like my training wheels ... hearing him as a teenager taught me to look at the guitar in a different way - and how to tap into that thing inside of me that was already leaning toward improvisation. You learn other players' licks at first; then you take off the training wheels and start using the licks as building blocks to make your own thing. That's how influences work. somewhere in whatever I do, there's a little bit of Hendrix - plus about a hundred others ~ Junior Brown

Brother Cavil:

In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? ...

I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way! ~ Ronald D. Moore

Ethics or simple honesty is the building blocks upon which our whole society is based, and business is a part of our society, and it's integral to the practice of being able to conduct business, that you have a set of honest standards. ~ Kerry Stokes

Most of the time in the 21st century, we dominate our surroundings: We tweak the thermostat, and the temperature falls one degree. We push a button, and Taylor Swift sings for us. It's the opposite in the wilderness, which teaches us constantly that we are not lords of the universe but rather building blocks of it. ~ Nicholas Kristof

The AXA and New York Life settlements are important building blocks not only toward seeking financial recovery for the losses resulting from the Armenian Genocide but also in our ultimate goal, which is for Turkey and the US to officially acknowledge the genocide. ~ Mark Geragos

If life is what you make it, the building blocks are your desire and your passion. ~ Chloe Thurlow

Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth ... all those glorious words. ~ Cornelia Funke

What I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar. ~ Lisa McInerney

Ideas are seeds of existence in absolute emptiness.
Creative words are the building blocks of such ideas. ~ Toba Beta

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ~ Carl Sagan

There are building blocks of love and the very bottom layer is comfort. (from Vanishing Acts) ~ Jodi Picoult

When we were children, letters were like fun toys. We played with them through our building blocks. We colored them in books. We danced and sang along with TV puppets while learning C was for "cookie." Soon, letters turned into words. Words turned into sentences. Sentences turned into thoughts. And along the way, we stopped playing with them and stopped marveling at A through Z. ~ Ji Lee

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn t? ~ Quentin Crisp

Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Chemistry begins in the stars. The stars are the source of the chemical elements, which are the building blocks of matter and the core of our subject. ~ Peter Atkins

In our culture, guilt is a tainted word, but it's probably one of the building blocks of conscience. ~ Susan Cain

Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position. ~ Nancy Kress

Since the water turns into Ice
Different physical shapes the eye See
but indeed their building blocks still remain same easy,
(H2O)
Farah Said. ~ Farah Said

My explorations of the technical world started with Legos, with which I was quite creative in constructing moving objects with the basic building blocks that were then available. ~ Wolfgang Ketterle

The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control. ~ Kenneth Keniston

After ten whole minutes of painful silence, I finally raised my hand and told Mr. O'Hara I loved Miranda Blythe's romance novels, and I decided I liked him immediately when he didn't laugh or reassure me that we'd be reading real books. Like Mrs. Andrews had last year.
He did say, 'I'm afraid Ms. Blythe is not on the curriculum this semester. We'll be starting your education with the epic poets - boring, I know, but necessary building blocks. However, an extra-credit book report is always welcome, and you're free to choose whatever topic you like.'
Then Mr. O'Hara added, 'I think Ms. Blythe's works would be a particularly interesting topic for a report. In fact, if you want an example of the archetypal hero journey - '
'Wait, wait, wait.' Fred raised his hand. 'You read romance novels?'
'My dear boy,' Mr. O'Hara replied, 'I read everything. ~ Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

Victories are a byproduct of a larger vision. It begins with a question:

How much do we owe one another?

Each coach's and player's individual answer is one of the building blocks of The Streak. De La Salle separates itself from the competition because everyone from the head coach to the least accomplished player on the roster is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to be their absolute best. ~ Neil Hayes

Kosher salt, eggs and flour. These are the building blocks of everything. Kosher salt, above and beyond everything. ~ Graham Elliot

Charles Darwin's only mistake was in not being a physicist, because the entire process of evolution started before our planet formed, with the event called the big bang, at this point our knowledge is such that I can hazard this further observation, all of the building blocks of life started at that moment, and that is how far we can back track this process of evolution. ~ Steve Merrick

My style is about making things last forever. When you're on a budget, it can be daunting to spend $300 on a pair of boots or a coat. But such basics are the building blocks from which your look is crafted. ~ Nina Garcia

Mr. Speaker, we have reached a point in history where some have forgotten that it is the family, not the government, that is the fundamental building block of our society. ~ Jim Ryun

Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it. ~ Al Franken

In a world where concepts are so often deployed in an ad hoc fashion, half explored before being displaced by others, it is immensely refreshing to encounter such serious and sustained attention to the building blocks of inquiry - and to the responsibilities thereby incurred. Designs on the Contemporary is a work of profound importance to the philosophy of anthropology. In conjunction with Rabinow's other works, it creates a nonpareil, a configuration of thought with no equal. ~ Marilyn Strathern

Redefining marriage will have huge implications for what is taught in our schools, and for wider society. It will redefine society since the institution of marriage is one of the fundamental building blocks of society. The repercussions of enacting same-sex marriage into law will be immense. ~ Keith O'Brien

Every Maryland family wants financial security, schools that work, quality healthcare, safer neighborhoods, and ever-expanding economic opportunity. These are the building blocks of a superior quality of life. ~ Bob Ehrlich

The building blocks that form the foundation of your great and successful future, are the actions you take today ~ Topsy Gift

Books aren't just my defenses, the sandbags I use to fortify my position; they are also the building blocks of my soul, and I am the sum of all I read. ~ Jonathan Hull

We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these four crops - five altogether, but one is cotton - and these are the building blocks of fast food. One of the ways you democratize healthy food is you support healthy food. ~ Michael Pollan

Creation offers proof (for those willing to accept it) of a powerful "Someone" behind the natural world. The astronomical odds against this world happening merely by chance provide insurmountable evidence for a Creator. The intricate beauty and complex design of the creation - from subatomic particles and the molecular building blocks of life to galaxies and the expanses of the universe - demonstrate that a "Designer" planned it all. ~ Anonymous

Good teams incorporate teamwork into their culture, creating the building blocks for success. ~ Ted Sundquist

Love is the fundamental building block of all human relationships. It will greatly impact our values and morals. Love is the important ingredient in one's search for meaning. ~ Gary Chapman

This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems. ~ John Henry Holland

I am happy with my past, my present and my future. All three are miraculous building blocks of my beloved, wonderful life. ~ Robert Muller

DON'T ABUSE ME, I've never flown one of these things before." Richard Reiss put the tip of his tongue between his teeth and squinted at the controls. While he did this, building blocks, tree limbs, and swirling leaves scudded past the plastic windscreen. Chaison stared at the ambassador. "Richard, why are you dressed as a clown?" Ballooning pantaloons and a polka-dotted top spilled out around the edges of Reiss's seat; he had red smudges on his cheeks that he'd obviously been trying to rub off. The ambassador turned with great dignity, fixed Chaison with a steely eye and said, "It is a very long story, and one I find I would rather not relate. ~ Karl Schroeder

The unwillingness to accept anything short of victory, that underlying fury, is the fundamental building block of my bottomless motivation to succeed. It is my credo in all that I do in life from battling cancer to bicycle racing. ~ Lance Armstrong

A single water drop contains all the necessary building blocks needed for life. ~ Anthony T. Hincks.

Playing grocery store is actually better for brain development than a math work sheet with cartoon shopping carts? It has to be some kind of trick. Yet after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished. ~ Erika Christakis

Trust, honesty, humility, transparency and accountability are the building blocks of a positive reputation. Trust is the foundation of any relationship. ~ Mike Paul

Some heat, some spice and plenty of citrus are the building blocks of many North African fish dishes. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

Concrete experiences serve as the primary building blocks from which we extend our capacity for thought and give rise to more abstracted concepts.

We understand the new in terms of the known. ~ Nick Sousanis

From the time I left the Marine Corps after serving as an infantry platoon and company commander in Vietnam, I decided that I would focus on immediate goals that inspired me to devote all of my energy to them, rather than putting together the more cautious and traditional building blocks of a predictable career. ~ Jim Webb

I used to believe that design was information architecture, and also that this architecture was built in the brain of an information recipient. Recently I've come to think that, although the materials of that architecture's construction are indeed the information brought from the outside by the sensory organs, at the same time some very important building blocks are also the recollected experiences, the memories, awakened by these external stimuli. People imagine the world and interpret it when outside stimuli awaken the mountain of their internally stored memories. ~ Kenya Hara

After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. ~ Fritz Leiber

The building blocks of Life are made up of shapes and spaces. ~ Joey Lawsin

There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into infinite richness of human sense and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of programmed games. ~ Ralph Nader

There's a cellular automaton called TVC. After Turing, von Neumann and Chiang. Chiang's version was N-dimensional. That leaves plenty of room for data within easy reach. In two dimensions, the original von Neumann machine had to reach further and further - and wait longer and longer - for each successive bit of data. In a six-dimensional TVC automaton, you can have a three-dimensional grid of computers, which keeps on growing indefinitely - each with its own three-dimensional memory, which can also grow without bound.

And when the simulated TVC universe being run on the physical computer is suddenly shut down, the best explanation for what I've witnessed will be a continuation of that universe - an extension made out of dust. Maria could almost see it: a vast lattice of computers, a seed of order in a sea of random noise, extending itself from moment to moment by sheer force of internal logic, "accreting" the necessary building blocks from the chaos of non-space-time by the very act of defining space and time. ~ Greg Egan

Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property-variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass- can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. ~ Frank Wilczek

It helps omit uninteresting details, provides convenient building blocks (such as while and console.log), allows you to define your own building blocks (such as sum and range), and makes those blocks easy to compose. ~ Marijn Haverbeke

The paradigm that is now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building-blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and - last, not least - the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature. ~ Fritjof Capra

When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations. ~ John Henry Holland

If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life. ~ Neill Blomkamp

Life is going to throw you some blocks. You will decide if they are going to be your stumbling blocks or your building blocks ~ Saji Ijiyemi

Have I added to their building blocks, shoring them up with strength and their own magnificence? Have I shown them enough color? Did I let them have enough ice cream and leave them alone enough without my anxieties? How can we know which is the right way? We have to go with our inner instincts and the feeling in our bones. But I can contribute to their growing cells, show them some foods that are better than others, walk with them, and encourage their own tastes. I can teach them to love and appreciate food, help them treat their bodies like gold, listen to them wanting more or less. The rest I have to trust. ~ Tessa Kiros

The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl. ~ Dave Barry

An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about. ~ Linus Torvalds

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society. ~ Zaha Hadid

I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov. ~ Rick Perlstein

Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of goals you are setting for yourself today. ~ Meg Jay

The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for a building and the builder's list of supplies. It specified the parts, the building blocks, and, somehow, the design of the whole, the way in which they are to be put together. ~ Iain McGilchrist

Marriage is one of the most important institutions we have, it binds society and families together, it is a building block that promotes stability. This bill supports and cultivates marriage. ~ Maria Miller

The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together. ~ Brien Foerster

When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God.

Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks ~ H.L. Mencken

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow's high-value organizations. They don't bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future. ~ Seth Godin

Workaholism is a block, not a building block. ~ Julia Cameron

My paintings are the result of countless small brushstrokes, each one shaded with a different blend of colors, each one with a single, deliberate purpose. Every moment, every day, we are all making something - whether it's science or art, a relationship or a destiny - building it choice by choice, moment by moment. Our decisions shape other people's worlds as well as our own. We are all the center of our own universe and all of use in someone else's orbit. It's a paradox, but sometimes paradoxes are where truth begins.
My father would point out that the Beatles told us all of this decades ago. They one sang that in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make. No, we can never be in complete control of our fates - we're all vulnerable to accidents, to cruelty, and to the random misfortune of life. But I try to think about how much of it is up to us. We decide what emotions serve as our building blocks, which feelings we'll use to shape our universe. ~ Claudia Gray

I'm quite optimistic. I'm also a realist. And I hope, you know, things work out. I don't think that the world will ever know peace. Complete peace in all countries. I think perhaps that's not in our makeup to do this although we can pray for it and work for it. But I think that the building blocks of peace are moving into shape, and I think that the world is going to be a better place. ~ Shirley Temple

One begins to think with that new building block, rather than with littler pieces. And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town. ~ Christopher Alexander

Wouldn't it be great if life was only Legos? If we could give our kids the right, simple building blocks? ~ Chris Bent