Expansive Quotes

It is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside.
... we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.
We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read, where our carriage is mostly empty, where the views are expansive and where the only sounds are those made by the wheels as they click against the rails in rhythmical succession. ~ Alain De Botton

With a more expansive stretch, there's a better chance that I'll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she's smart and beautiful. ~ Frank Bruni

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing - each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture - pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness. ~ Emil M. Cioran

In my experience, the universe falls in with worthy plans and most especially with festive and expansive ones. I have seldom conceived a delicious plan without being given the means to accomplish it. Understand that the what must come before the how. First choose what you would do. The how usually falls into place of itself. ~ Julia Cameron

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view.'
'Americans havea bad habbit of thinking like Americans,' Roxane said kindly. ~ Ann Patchett

Acceptance is the most beautiful word in any language; this beautiful concept can only exist when you allow other people to be who they are and do not imprison them with your definition of what is right, proper, correct, or other limiting criteria. Decreasing the black and white in your thinking allows for an expansive area of gray, allowing you to live your life and others to live there life. Acceptance sets us all free! This simple change of thought creates a wonderful space for happiness to thrive. ~ David W. Earle

I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they will have to deal with. ~ Elena Ferrante

Everyone creates realities based on their own personal beliefs. These beliefs are so powerful that they can create [expansive or entrapping] realities over and over.~Kuan Yin ~ Hope Bradford

The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world. ~ Tom Robbins

An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket. ~ Anton Chekhov

It matters what you believe. Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies. ~ Sophia Lyon Fahs

Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive. ~ Edward St. Aubyn

The last glow of sundown dims away. Stars appear in the east. Night encloses us. The ocean seems to enlarge. When you're adrift at night, imagination and perception merge. They have to. You can't see as well, as far, as deep. You tie knots by muscle memory, and you operate your reel mostly by feel. Your boat drifts, your thoughts drift. You sense the sweep of tide and water, and the boat gets rocked in turbulence just past each undersea ridgeline and boulder field. You, too, are looking up, searching constellations, dreaming. You fell again how flexible and expansive your mind can be when it's working right. And you slip your leash to explore the vast vault of sky and great interior spaces. ~ Carl Safina

The internationalization of economic activity and its major vehicle, the TNC, can be regarded simply as being part of the normal expansive process of capitalist development. ~ Peter Dicken

To what end do we sit together under the moon? Why circle in together?
We sit to be heard. To speak without being judged. To share our stories without having to make an articulate point.
We sit to listen. To rekindle the ancient art of listening with open hearts. To know other women on a heart to heart level.
We sit to spill tears and laughter, and to hold on to a strong thread of silent solidarity.
We sit to see truth. To have parts of ourselves revealed to us. To have the stories of others laid bare. To hear words spoken that shoot into the heart like a lightning strike. To come to understand a wisdom unveiled in silence.
We sit to dig our toes into the cosmos. To be pulled into the expansive river of consciousness that we didn't know existed. To experience a oneness with humankind and the universe that feels like floating along on gentle rapids. We meet together to have our cynical minds opened by a shooting star's approving appearance, or to watch the clouds pass over the face of the moon and be flushed with the deep sense of belonging. ~ Lucy AitkenRead

An awakened mind
and heart will serve
you well. Rigidity stalls
upward progress. Be as
expansive as you can.
Even when you think
you've reached your
limit, there's more to
unlearn and relearn. ~ Kristen Lee

Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment.

Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. ~ Tim Wu

And all of a sudden I began to understand his strangeness that made people shrug and mock; his dreaminess, his love of solitude, his silent manner. Now I understood why he sat on the look-out hill of an evening and why he spent a night by himself on the riverbank, why he constantly hearkened to sounds others could not hear and why his eyes would suddenly gleam and his drawn eyebrows twitch. He was a man deeply in love. I felt it was not simply a love for another person, it was somehow an uncommon, expansive love for life and earth. He had kept this love within himself, in his music, in his very being. A person with no feeling, no matter how good his voice, could never have sung like that. ~ Chingiz Aitmatov

To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy. ~ Irving Babbitt

It would be hard. After all, I'm working. I'm a mother. Number one, I'm a mother & housewife, so there's the house kind of chores. In the evenings, I might attend some meeting, & then late at night, I would be either writing to the brothers & sisters in prison or working on the leaflets of their cases. Then on the weekend, at least every other weekend, we'd visit the political prisoners...I mean everybody has their whole life & things they have to do at home. But I'll tell you, we were busy during this time. Every week, more brothers & sisters would be arrested. We were working on scores of cases at the same time--trying to keep up with visiting, writing, attending court hearings. If I could show you all the leaflets we made, you'd get an idea of how expansive the work was. ~ Diane C. Fujino

Pleasure so exquisite that her entire body thrummed with it, and emotions so expansive and consuming that she didn't know where Lucien ended and she began. ~ Kitty French

At five thirty, the light was perfect: buttery and dense and fat somehow, swelling the room as it had the train into something expansive and hopeful. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I think a lot about Big Mind-Small Mind, expansive, wide-lens consciousness and contracted, introverted consciousness. I have moments-we all do-when just being alive is a pleasure and a miracle. They feel like moments when the shutters of the mind are open so I can look out. It also feels as if those same shutters have no hooks to fix them in an open position. One small wind and bang-they slam shut. ~ Sylvia Boorstein

The inner aspects of reincarnation have to do with where you put your mind. The more expansive state of mind you enter into, the less suffering there is. ~ Frederick Lenz

The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly. ~ Liu Cixin

Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment. ~ Paula Hawkins

It's funny how your mind can be open, expansive, to almost anything but when there's a hard limit, something your brain can't make that extra leap for, it all shuts down. ~ Karina Halle

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art. ~ David Lovelace

Some people say they feel very small when they think about space. I felt more expansive, very connected to the universe. ~ Mae Jemison

Zombies - obviously they're doing it in a much more expansive way on The Walking Dead - basically, what you used to do is you put a bunch of goo on an actor and have them shamble towards you, and it's a very effective creature. It always has tremendous impact, just that feeling of death coming for you; that's universally accepted. ~ David Hayter

The more I know about myself the more dynamic I become, the more expansive I become. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

... if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it's a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you're thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be. ~ Tony Kushner

Flocks of magpies have descended on our yard. I cannot sleep for all their raucous behavior. Perched on weathered fences, their green-black tales, long as rulers, wave up and down, reprimanding me for all I have not done.

I have done nothing for weeks. I have no work. I don't want to see anyone much less talk. All I want to do is sleep.

Monday, I hit rock-bottom, different from bedrock, which is solid, expansive, full of light and originality. Rock-bottom is the bottom of the rock, the underbelly that rarely gets turned over; but when it does, I am the spider that scurries from daylight to find another place to hide.

Today I feel stronger, learning to live with the natural cycles of a day and to not expect so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.... ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas-where we all understood he wanted authority to act-but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused. ~ Tom Daschle

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a particular point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to have that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.

On the other hand, a person who takes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as is required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist'. ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

In The Jaguar's Children we enter the dangerous borderlands between countries and generations; myth and magic; human community and the vast, infinitely mysterious, wild environment. Here, John Vaillant proves that his heart and imagination are as expansive and fierce as his radiant intellect. Never have I encountered a writer with more energy or compassion. ~ Melanie Rae Thon

My nose is Gargantuan! You little Pig-snout, you tiny Monkey-Nostrils, you virtually invisible Pekinese-Puss, don't you realize that a nose like mine is both scepter and orb, a monument to me superiority? A great nose is the banner of a great man, a generous heart, a towering spirit, an expansive soul
such as I unmistakably am, and such as you dare not to dream of being, with your bilious weasel's eyes and no nose to keep them apart! With your face as lacking in all distinction
as lacking, I say, in interest, as lacking in pride, in imagination, in honesty, in lyricism
in a word, as lacking in nose as that other offensively bland expanse at the opposite end of your cringing spine
which I now remove from my sight by stringent application of my boot! ~ Edmond Rostand

I spent three years researching American Rose, research that included connecting with Gypsy's sister, the late actress June Havoc (I was the last person to interview her) and Gypsy's son, and also spending countless hours immersed in Gypsy's expansive archives at the New York Public Library. I became obsessed with figuring out the person behind the persona. ~ Karen Abbott

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me. ~ Molly Antopol

'This is how democracy works,' Barack Obama lectured the country before giving everyone the specifics of his expansive one-man executive overreach on immigration. If you enjoy platitudinous straw men but are turned off by open debate and constitutional order, this speech was for you. ~ David Harsanyi

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If people give up their attachment to expansive government, they will feel free to fight the income tax. ~ Sheldon Richman

Even though I want to expand the number of ways in which skilful ironic play happens, I suspect I'm probably guilty of the same shortcoming - and I hope that, one of these days, someone will claim that my book, while it goes in a salutary expansive direction, doesn't go far enough, that there are assumptions I make that show I've missed aspects of Mann's irony and ambiguity. ~ Philip Kitcher

The relatives didn't feel slighted - they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet. ~ Alice Munro

She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course this somewhere had to be somewhere "safe." She could walk to her office. But she didn't want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn't belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn't room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche. ~ Lisa Genova

Delving deeply in this [gender healing] work inevitably takes people on an inner journey, and, if they follow it far enough, they are ultimately let into an awakening of an expansive, all-encompassing love. ~ William Keepin

As this pain comes up also focus on the love you feel for him/her. Focus on the love. Love feels good, love is expansive. Love is open and accepting. This love you feel is healing the pain of your loss. One day soon your pain will go and only the love will remain. ~ John Gray

He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don't walk in front of cars take care and be good and don't hurt or be hurt and don't live in a way that makes you feel dead and don't betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don't and please remember and make sure ~ Zadie Smith

The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us.
All delirium is expansive.
All impulses escape stereotyping. ~ Isidore Isou

His own true hidden reality that he had desired to know grew palpable, recognizable. It seemed to him just this: a great, glad, abounding hope that he had saved his brother; too expansive to be contained by the limited form of a sole man, it yearned for a new embodiment infinite as the stars.
What did it matter to that true reality that the man's brain shrank, shrank, till it was nothing; that the man's body could not retain the huge pain of his heart, and heaved it out through the red exit riven at the neck: that hurtling blackness blotted out forever the man's sight, hearing, sense? ~ Clemence Housman

My soul, when I tend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will ever be, because my soul desires only one thing: wonder. And since creativity is my most efficient pathway to wonder, I take refuge there, and it feeds my soul, and it quiets the hungry ghost - thereby saving me from the most dangerous aspect of myself. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other. ~ John William Draper

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did - and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Early readers assumed the Book of Mormon people ranged up and down North and South America from upstate New York to Chili. A close reading of the text reveals it cannot sustain such an expansive geography. ~ Richard Bushman

John Kerry's newfound interest in fiscal discipline is a political gimmick that defies his 20-year record in the Senate and stands in stark contrast to his reckless and expansive promises of new government spending on the campaign trail. ~ Steve Schmidt

A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate. ~ John Cheever

Spring's an expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours. ~ Christina Rossetti

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. ~ Virginia Woolf

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products. ~ Ellen Willis

Genius is expansive, irresistible, and irresistibly expansive. If it is in you, no cords can confine it. ~ Mary Abigail Dodge

All change can be expansive in potential. The choice is ours. ~ Julia Cameron

If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that's endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn't inherent in the place but in your state of mind. ~ Pema Chodron

And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by 'love.' While sin is possessive, love is expansive. Sin's characteristic is the desire to get; love's characteristic is the desire to give. ~ John R.W. Stott

Many people in recovery find that they feel spiritually grounded when in regular contact with the great outdoors. Others feel a deep serenity after lighting a candle in a church or temple or by chanting a sacred mantra. The point is that, unlike a typical religion that lays out a non-negotiable ideology, spirituality is expansive and deeply personal. ~ Christopher Dines

Whether we're seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn't an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it's an experience that's expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened. ~ Pema Chodron

Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional. ~ Jessica Lange

For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate. ~ Richard Powers

One of the wonderful things about Portlandia - and I'm not just blowing smoke, although I can blow smoke, but I'm not - is that there is an expansive feeling to each segment. It's not reductive. It doesn't seem like sketch comedy. ~ Scott Raab

A human being, in order to function fully and effectively in this world, needs to develop in himself all four of these tools of maturity: 1) physical energy and bodily self-control; 2) emotional calmness and expansive feeling; 3) dynamic, persistent will power; and 4) a clear-sighted, practical intellect. Remove any one of these aspects from the equation and the equation itself becomes distorted. Each aspect depends for its perfection on the other three ... These tools are best developed in sequence: bodily awareness first, then sensitivity of feeling, then will power, and last of all, intellect. ~ Swami Kriyananda

Pasquale considered his friend's face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee's face, like Michael Deane's face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality - that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor - and he remembered, too, Dee Moray saying she'd spent years "waiting for her movie to start," and that she'd almost missed out on her life waiting for it. ~ Jess Walter

The activities of La Condamine, Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, and other such explorers touched on only the tiniest fraction of the vastness of a world so expansive as to be impervious to harm. But today, the Amazon River Basin, occupying more than 2.7 million square miles is at our fingertips and is considered one of the most ecologically threatened regions of the world. ~ Kurt Johnson

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable. ~ Aurora Levins Morales

The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth. ~ Sam Kean

Certain corpuscles, denominated Christmas Books, with the ostensible intention of swelling the tide of exhilaration, or other expansive emotions, incident upon the exodus of the old and the inauguration of the New Year. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Guitar is great for a certain thing, but a piano is so much more expansive. ~ Mick Ralphs

Your sadness doesn't make you less of a human being. In fact, it makes you more. More expansive. More connected. Painfully beautiful. Raw. Open. Completely alive. ~ Panache Desai

I like expansive stuff that has a lot of space in it, like some of the early Pink Floyd albums. ~ Steven Price

The movements of the highest warriors are relaxed and expansive because they fight for a cause larger than themselves. Only by surrendering to God's will does one find victory in battle and serenity in life. Serafim started pacing again, as he did ~ Dan Millman

When religions disagree about just creation, there is nothing to do but argue. When two scientists disagree about evolution, they confer with colleagues, develop theories, collect evidence, and arrive at a more complete understanding. Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. ~ Bill Nye

But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same. ~ Allie Brosh

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication. ~ Irving Babbitt

Or maybe, in my gut, I felt like I was missing out on something. I knew there was more to life than a pixelated curtain. There was a wide, expansive world all around me and I was confined to live inside such a narrow one. And I wanted to break free. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

The curtains were blood-red and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two storeys high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expansive ceiling featuring a gaggle of naked Greeks. It was the sort of library you'd marry a man for. ~ Catherine Lowell

Because he wanted nothing from her; this was a generous, expansive feeling, unattached to the possibility of gratification; it was the simple happiness that came from knowing that one particular person was alive in the world ~ Jo Baker

The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said. ~ Roxane Gay

The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be. ~ David Hackett Fischer

Precollege program orientation was scheduled for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime.
1. My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy.
2. I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend.
2b. Loudly.
2c. He did this as often as he could.
2d. To wit: "A latte for my niece and her young man"; "Charlotte, wasn't that your Jamie's favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner's later work -"; "Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren't barbarians/" And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons. ~ Willem Dafoe

Environmentalists hate sprawl - except when it comes to the size of their expansive pet legislation on Capitol Hill. ~ Michelle Malkin

Contemplate for a moment hiking up a wild and rugged mountain. The mountain itself is a challenge, as well as the experience of beauty and danger. To reach the top, a person must persevere. The higher one goes up the mountain the more one can see of the landscape around. There is, in seeing an expansive view, a natural delight and exhilaration that anyone who makes the effort feels. This natural delight corresponds to the spiritual joy of gaining a higher perception of life. Mountains correspond to heaven. The delight of gaining an elevated view on a mountain is the reflection (correspondence) of spiritually gaining wisdom in one's soul. ~ Steve Sanchez

In a situation like this, of course you identify with everyone who's suffering. (But we must also think about) the terrorists who are creating such horrible future lives for themselves because of the negativity of this karma. It's all of our jobs to keep our minds as expansive as possible. If you can see (the terrorists) as a relative who's dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion. There's nothing better. ~ Richard Gere

Upon an ever expansive horizon, Life reveals Her mystery; To live is a gift, to feel is a blessing, and to take part in Her beauty is a miracle renewed each day. ~ Francisco De Ajofrín

We keep referring to white supremacy as just a 'system' or 'institution', rather than a living, insidious, expansive colonial force that works to 'get inside', consume and destroy. ~ Aph Ko

Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She ~ Gustave Flaubert

An environment of infinite economic expansion is unsustainable in a world of finite resources. ~ Bryant McGill

Brought up, as Mahomet was, in the house of the guardian of the Caaba, the ceremonies and devotions connected with the sacred edifice may have given an early bias to his mind, and inclined it to those speculations in matters of religion by which it eventually became engrossed. Though his Moslem biographers would fain persuade us his high destiny was clearly foretold in his childhood by signs and prodigies, yet his education appears to have been as much neglected as that of ordinary Arab children ; for we find that he was not taught either to read or write. He was a thoughtful child, however ; quick to observe, prone to meditate on all that he observed, and possessed of an imagination fertile, daring, and expansive. The yearly influx of pilgrims from distant parts made Mecca a receptacle for all kinds of floating knowledge, which he appears to have imbibed with eagerness and retained in a tenacious memory ; and as he increased in years, a more extended sphere of observation was gradually opened to him. ~ Washington Irving

So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space. ~ Jessica Lange