Constant Vigilance Quotes

I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore - words I didn't know I knew - until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until he could be sure that I would be silent again. He didn't understnad, you see. He hadn't worked it out yet. That Will would try again. That our lives would be spent in a state of constant vigilance, waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he could inflict upon himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes - the potential poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the potential for that one act. And he had the advantage - he had nothing else to think about, you see ? Two weeks later, I told Will, "Yes". Of course I did. What else could I have done ? ~ Jojo Moyes

Everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further-I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever felt myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. Everything ... needed to be jettisoned. But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough to even know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting. ~ Lynn Barber

It takes constant vigilance not to slip into negativity or simple apathy. It takes courage to believe over any given period of time that we are getting better and not sliding into decline. ~ Julia Cameron

Our government conceived in freedom and purchased with blood can be preserved only by constant vigilance. ~ William Jennings Bryan

The task of the media in a democracy is not to ease the path of those who govern, but to make life difficult for them by constant vigilance as to how they exercise the power they only hold in trust from the people. ~ Jimmy Reid

Worry and improper thinking are luxuries as dangerous as drink. ~ Evangeline Walton

Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity. ~ George Gilder

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. ~ Italo Calvino

While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments. ~ Jimmy Wales

Conservatism is an active intellectual pursuit; it requires a constant vigilance. It has nothing to do with feelings. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. You just see suffering and say, 'Oh, I feel so horrible!' ~ Rush Limbaugh

Constant vigilance! ~ J.K. Rowling

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union. ~ Henry Kissinger

Our government, conceived in liberty and purchased with blood, can be preserved only by constant vigilance. May we guard it as our children's richest legacy, for what shall it profit our nation if it shall gain the whole world and lose "the spirit that prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere"? ~ William Jennings Bryan

Chinese cooking is noisy - a multitasking activity that requires constant vigilance. There is no downtime. ~ Jennifer Lee

But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The constant vigilance and my heightened anxiety that I'd screw it up anyway exhausted me, but I persevered. ~ Tracey Garvis Graves

Most of us who got into film industry in early 2000s weren't prepared for the constant vigilance that being a celebrity requires, and there's no school for learning how to handle it well or gracefully. It's a hard thing to figure out. A lot of people don't deal with it well because they're either too paranoid or they're doing things they probably shouldn't be doing in public. ~ Megan Fox

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness. ~ Mary Karr

And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human. ~ M T Anderson

This thing was power from the Outside, and I was a grain of sand to its oncoming tide. But you know what? That grain of sand might be the last remnant of what had once been a mountain, but that which it is, it is. The tide comes and the tide goes. Let it hammer the grain of sand as it may. Let lofty mountains fear the slow, constant assault of the waters. Let the valleys shudder at the pitiless advance of ice. Let continents drown beneath the dark and rising tide. But that grain of sand? It isn't impressed. Let the tide roll in. The sand will still be there when it rolls out again. -Harry Dresden, Cold Days by Jim Butcher ~ Jim Butcher

Lovable work is visible work. The question of who gets a public platform as a worker and who does not is neatly side-stepped by Jobs's narrative. What do those in the invisible workforce call themselves in their social media profiles? What kinds of identities are available to them? These questions are critical because, as Jonathan Crary notes in his recent book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, while the notion of identity is bound up with public visibility, today that public exposure has become detached from communal forms that once provided safekeeping and care. Crary notes that in the always-on, 24/7 temporality in which we now live, the pressure to be constantly consuming or producing necessitates a constant presence in the public sphere, specifically in the marketplace. ~ Miya Tokumitsu

Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

I have talked with many pastors whose real struggle isn't first with the hardship of ministry, the lack of appreciation and involvement of people, or difficulties with fellow leaders. No, the real struggle they are having, one that is very hard for a pastor to admit, is with God. What is caused to ministry become hard and burdensome is disappointment and anger at God.

We have forgotten that pastoral ministry is war and that you will never live successfully in the pastorate if you live with the peacetime mentality. Permit me to explain. The fundamental battle of pastoral ministry is not with the shifting values of the surrounding culture. It is not the struggle with resistant people who don't seem to esteem the Gospel. It is not the fight for the success of ministries of the church. And is not the constant struggle of resources and personnel to accomplish the mission. No, the war of the pastor is a deeply personal war. It is far on the ground of the pastor's heart. It is a war values, allegiances, and motivations. It's about the subtle desires and foundational dreams. This war is the greatest threat to every pastor. Yet it is a war that we often naïvely ignore or quickly forget in the busyness of local church ministry.

When you forget the Gospel, you begin to seek from the situations, locations and relationships of ministry what you already have been given in Christ. You begin to look to ministry for identity, security, hope, well-being, meeting, and purp ~ Paul David Tripp

There were no seasons in the cave, only constant heat, and misty green opalescence. ~ Brian Jacques

And Futh, looking at the lighthouse, wondered how this could happen--how there could be this constant warning of danger, the taking of all these precautions, and yet still there was all this wreckage. ~ Alison Moore

Better than fame is still the wish for fame, the constant training for a glorious strife. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise. ~ Michael Foley

In marriage the greatest hatred that is possible between human beings can be generated, perhaps because of the constant proximity, perhaps because once there was love. The intimacy is still there, even though the love element has disappeared. So a will to power, a struggle for domination, comes into being. ~ Philip K. Dick

The divine doesn't appear by glimpses, in peak moments with sudden blinding light. The divine is constant; it is we who come and go. ~ Deepak Chopra

Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement ~ Albert Renger-Patzsch

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It's okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world. ~ Janet Mock

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Welcome the small cracking of your hard-clodded shell,
Embrace the warm sting of tears,
Kiss the shadow which frightens you awake as you turn the corners of your day,
Love the whole of everything,
Smooth sunshine skies and
Jagged edges
Which all seek us out in
Constant whisper and touch
To say, 'hello, Beautiful. You're alive ~ Jacob Nordby

I am not feeling any better because I cannot stay in bed, having constant cause for walking. They say I leave at night by the window of my tower, hanging from a red umbrella with which I set fire to the forest! ~ Camille Claudel

Later in life, the memories I have of my mother are of constant work balanced with caring for my ailing father. ~ Gloria Estefan

The only way to live a long life is in a state of constant boredom. ~ Gerd De Ley

The ability to experience bliss requires the gift of attentive awareness, curiosity, and constant learning. We are ultimately the product of what we want – our personal obsessions – and how we think. Thoughts merge into feelings that determine if we are happy or sad. Feelings can manifest into thoughts that drive our ambitions and guide our personal actions, which enable us to live an intensified life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The sharks had, in fact, remained a constant presence throughout the men's ordeal, even during the daylight hours. Not long after [navy pilot] Gwinn showed up, a massive shark attack--involving an estimated thirty fish--had, in about fifteen minutes, taken some sixty boys perched on a floater net. ~ Doug Stanton

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process.

As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough.

One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples.

When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team.

Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach.

You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error - just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community.

Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight.

The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and ~ Steve Murrell

Wouldst thou wisely, and with pleasure,
Pass the days of life's short measure,
From the slow one counsel take,
But a tool of him ne'er make;
Ne'er as friend the swift one know,
Nor the constant one as foe. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Friendship means never having to be alone, it means there's a constant wall of solidarity even when everything else is crumbling around you. If he's the crumble in your life, then I'll be the damn wall! ~ Emma Hart

Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all. ~ George Santayana

Nature is never static. It is always changing. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Nothing endures. Everything is in the process of either coming into being or expiring. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Life is a state of constant radiation and absorption; to exist is to radiate; to exist is to be the recipient of radiations. ~ William George Jordan

But one thing that's constant is we've always appreciated fans. They put us on the map and they keep us on the map. I always put myself in their position. If I loved someone and had their posters all over my wall and met them and they were rude it would be very hurtful. ~ Cheryl James

Look there." Regina pointed toward the northern sky. "Polaris."
Viktor looked up. "The constant north star, one of man's most dependable guides."
"Polaris will be waiting for us there when we are old and have experienced a lifetime of joys and regrets," Regina said, a wistful note in her voice. "That fact makes me feel like one of God's most insignificant creatures. ~ Patricia Grasso

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue. ~ Jeff Raikes

Justice is like an invisible creature that flees before us. As long as we keep chasing it, we have it. It's the constant seeking for law and justice that constitutes law and justice. . . . All confusion and disorder and disintegration is just semblance and illusion. Law and order endure in secret. Truth and justice are not a conjuring trick. ~ Torgny Lindgren

The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner. A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue. ~ Bonaventure

Frequently I will end a service of worship in our congregation by saying something like, "Every day this week you have to decide if you want to achieve your life or receive it. If you make achieving your goal, your constant companion will be complaint, because you will never achieve enough. If you make receiving the goal, your constant companion will be gratitude for all that God is achieving in your life." I'm not certain that there are such things as measures of our spirituality, but if there are, then gratitude is probably the best one. It indicates that we are paying attention. ~ M. Craig Barnes

Professionalism is like love: it is made up of the constant flow of little bits of proof that testify to devotion and care. Everything else is pretension or incompetence. ~ Tomislav Sola

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance - not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. ~ Jane Jacobs

Just as today science recognizes the constant recurrence of simple, tiny atomic particles in all sort of organized matter, our ancestors had the intuition that there was a secret rhythm in Nature which was the same in every single natural manifestation. A crane dance must mirror star dances, and human dance is an alphabet to decipher the unknown. ~ Pippa Pralen

I didn't want to be different. I longed to be everything grownups wanted, so they would love me. I followed all their rules, tried my best to please. But there was something about me that made them knit their eyebrows and frown. No one ever offered a name for what was wrong with me. That's what made me afraid it was really bad. I only came to recognize its melody through this constant refrain: 'Is that a boy or a girl?' ~ Leslie Feinberg

You are aware, I suppose, that I lived through two years of torture? Two years in hell, so I can stand before you now. Or lean before you, twisted as an old tree root. A crippled, shambling, wretched mockery of a man, eh, Lord Hoff? Let us be honest with one another. Sometimes I lose control of my own leg. My own eyes. My own face." He snorted. "If you can call it a face. My bowels, too, are rebellious. I often wake up daubed in my own shit. I find myself in constant pain, and the memories of everything that I have lost nag at me, endlessly." He felt his left eye twitching. Let it twitch. "So you can see how, despite my constant efforts to be a man of sunny temper, I find that I despise the world, and everything in it, and myself most of all. A regrettable state of affairs, for which there is no remedy. ~ Joe Abercrombie

The only way to maintain our position in the Kingdom of God is to so conduct ourselves that we may have a living testimony of the truth continually dwelling in our bosoms, to live so that the Spirit of the Lord may be a constant and abiding guest with us, whether in the privacy of our chamber, in the domestic circle or in the midst of the crowded thoroughfares, the busy scenes and anxious cares of life. He who will pursue this course will never lack for knowledge; he will never be in doubt or in darkness, nor will his mind ever be clouded by the gloomy pall of unbelief; on the contrary his hopes will be bright; his faith will be strong; his joy will be full; he will be able to each succeeding day to comprehend the unfolding purposes of Jehovah and to rejoice in the glorious liberty and happiness which all the faithful children of God enjoy... ~ George Q. Cannon

The law of all modern states takes account of associations, whose members, in theory, pursue the common end with equal zeal. The experience of all associations proves, however, that this is not the case, and that a lively, constant and vigorous awareness of the end is found only in a minority of the associates; an association is really rather like a comet - a large tail of docile followers dragged along by a small dynamic head. ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

When I wasn't in the barn garden, helping out, sorting seeds or checking hoses I'd spend time alone, usually in the bathroom adjacent to Joel's room, staring into the shattered mirror as my hand gently caressed my baby bump.
More often than not I would cry. Not because my pregnancy upset me, or that my hormones were getting the better of me, but because I missed Joel, my baby's father. That the baby would grow up without a dad made me anxious. Then again, if he had survived, what irreparable damage would he have suffered and how would his pain translate to his child? Jesus, I was studying myself in the very mirror he'd smashed the night he chose to take his own life.

The bump had grown slowly in the last couple of months. With these limited resources, I didn't have the privilege of eating whatever I craved. Had that been the case, I was sure I would have been bigger by now. Still, I tried to eat as well and as often as I could and the size of my belly had proven that my attempts at proper nutrition were at least growing something in there.

Nothing made me happier than feeling my baby move. It was a constant source of relief for me. In our present circumstances, with no vitamins and barely any meat products save the recent stash of jerky Earl had found in an abandoned trailer, my diet consisted of berries, lettuce, and canned beans for the most part. Feeling the baby move inside me was an experience I often enjoyed alone. I would think of Joel then a ~ Michael Poeltl

All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment. ~ Claude Bernard

I never stop making sure that what I say is the best of what could be said about a particular thing. It's a constant evolution. If I planted a tree one way yesterday, and somebody tells me of a better way to plant a tree, I think, 'You know, they're right, that's better.' Then I change my way to accommodate the new way of planting trees. ~ Martha Stewart

Yet the French have managed to be involved without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there's no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents." one Parisian mother tells me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time. ~ Pamela Druckerman

The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn't move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war. ~ Seanan McGuire

The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat - coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold. ~ Herta Muller

The fact is, race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident, real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counter productive. I grew up in a family that believed that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your reaction to them. There was no room for being a victim or depending on the white man to take care of you. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Einstein wrestled with a problem back before we even knew the universe was expanding, and he was looking for a way to keep the universe from collapsing. And so he discovered, in his theory of gravity, something like this dark energy - he called it a cosmological constant - could play this role, pushing things away. ~ Adam Riess

May good fortune be your constant companion. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.