External Quotes

If I could offer only one key to understanding this divine dialogue, it would be to remember that it takes place in the depths of consciousness and that Krishna is not some external being, human or superhuman, but the spark of divinity that lies at the core of the human personality. This is not literary or philosophical conjecture; Krishna says as much to Arjuna over and over: "I am the Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and the beginning, middle, and end of their existence" (10:20). ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

Happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart. ~ John Carpenter

An entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potential without being impeded by any external obstacle. ~ Slavoj Zizek

What you are, and who you are should provide greater clarity about where you have been and where you are headed. Although one distinguishes spiritual from physical nature, the ultimate unification of the two is the consequence of the struggle for internal, external and eternal – peace. ~ T.F. Hodge

If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. ~ John O'Donohue

The external rest comes unexpected. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To feel overflowing love and almost unbearable compassion for all living creatures is the best way to fulfil the wishes of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Even if for the moment you cannot actually help a sentient being in an external way, meditate on love and compassion constantly over the months and years until compassion is knit inseparably into the very fabric of your mind. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The Ball Poem"

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball.
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over - there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight.
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy. ~ John Berryman

If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition. From this, of course, it does not follow that you can explain the existence of entities as complex as man by exactly the same principles on their own. It is no good taking the right number of atoms and shaking them together with some external energy till they happen to fall into the right pattern, and out drops Adam! ~ Richard Dawkins

Some philosophers are drawn to the subject [of philosophy] via their interest in the nature and structure of the world external to us. Others are drawn to it by an interest in the capacities that make humans distinctive in the world. I am a philosopher of the latter sort. My work thus far has been clustered around the nexus of knowledge, communication, and human action. ~ Jason Stanley

What does introspection mean? It means you're looking in the wrong direction. ~ Marty Rubin

How does one get rid of fear? Ramana: What is fear? It is only a thought. If there is anything besides the Self there is reason to fear. Who sees things separate from the Self? First the ego arises and sees objects as external. If the ego does not rise, the Self alone exists and there is nothing external. For anything external to oneself implies the existence of the seer within. Seeking it there will eliminate doubt and fear. Not only fear, all other thoughts centred round the ego will disappear along with it. ~ Ramana Maharshi

Life is in balance. The swings in the mind are there to give you the experience, and to let you discover the you within you ... That balance and swing lets your standard be tested. You cannot hold to something external. You must find your own depth and test it, confirm it ... ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Its not the eyes, that makes the visualization of the external world possible, but its the perception out of the awareness field. Your eyes are the same, but you view two person differently. ~ Roshan Sharma

It is clear that something is seriously lacking in the way we humans are going about things. But what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. By inner values, I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warm-heartedness-or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner value emerge. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

An organization with excellent internal communication will run smoothly, allowing its members to progress toward a mutual goal, which will ultimately affect the quality of external communication. ~ Scribendi

Never Let Your Inner Mental Peace Be Disturbed By External Circumstances. ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

PSYCHOSIS: A severe mental disorder, a derangement of personality. Some individuals experience mood swings and agitation, but emotional dampening and social withdrawal are the most common symptoms. Despite society's beliefs, psychotic individuals rarely become violent and are often at a much greater risk of causing harm to themselves than to others.8 There are many theories as to what causes psychosis. Many current theories agree that it is caused by a combination of inherited genetic factors and external environmental factors. ~ Alessandra Torre

There is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. ~ George Lakoff

Out of Mind spring in-numerable things, conditioned by discrimination (i.e., classification) and habit-energy; these things people accept as an external world. ... ~ Alan W. Watts

In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help--exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I have not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I took my oath of office to serve as your Governor, remember, I swore to steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state like a grizzly with cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own. Alaska, as a statewide family, we've got to fight for each other, not against and not let external, sensationalized distractions draw us off course. As an exciting year of unpredictable change begins, we, too, have our work cut out for us. And we're all in this together. Just like our musk ox, they circle up to protect their future when they are challenged. We've got to do the same. ~ Sarah Palin

Don't let the case from 1995 fool you. Early Bil Gates Beige is just a color. Many wonders lurk therein."

"Many wonders?"

"A fast-as-hell processor. Shit-tons of memory. A hard drive that could crack nuts. And best of all, for our purposes, some very expensive audio editing software that I did not pay for."

"Ah. And the rest of this stuff--over here on the bookcase?"

"External drives. A CD burner. Extra parts. And that thing on the end that looks like a little hot plate is a mug-warmer my grandmother gave me for Christmas. So that's not part of FrankenHal. ~ Cherie Priest

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. ~ Mary Karr

Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion ... peaceful co-operation of man is now obtained by external means - by law courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspections ... It should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on.

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions). ~ Gregory Bateson

had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. You ~ Oscar Wilde

OUR MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves. ~ William Irvine

In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments. ~ Peter A. Levine

The truth of beyng is the beyng of truth - said in this way, it sounds like an artificial and forced reversal and, at most, like a seduction to a dialectical game. In fact, this reversal is merely a fleeting and external sign of the turning which essentially occurs in beyng itself and which casts light on what might be meant here by decision. ~ Martin Heidegger

It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe - biotechnology and nanotechnology - are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support. ~ Ralph Nader

Believers are often thought of as people who have some kind of private conviction or repudiation of something, whereas "the faithful" refers to a relationship, which was also incidentally the earlier sense of "faith" in premodern, preliberal Christianity. This is not to say, incidentally, that "faith" refers simply to external behavior as opposed to internal belief but that it refers to an act. ~ Talal Asad

Service is a promise that cannot be seen, touched, or felt through any of our external senses. ~ Jag Randhawa

Internal growth and development were not entirely unaffected by my external environment. No amount of escapism, through either the physical or the mental outlets, could cushion me from the reality of what was taking place. ~ Sara Niles

Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man, double-faced by nature, is placed by Revelation under a sharp, precise external rule, controlling his actions and his thoughts. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

External conditions can, to a certain extent, reduce, but never cancel individual repsonsibility. ~ Albert Einstein

Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia. ~ Dan Savage

If we want sincere harmony, peace and joy in our lives, we can have them, but we must be willing to do the work. We must make maintaining an awareness of our spiritual natures first in our lives. Our inner world is the architect of our external world. We don't lose faith in the goodness of life because we become angry and depressed. We become angry and depressed because we lose faith in the goodness of life. ~ Susan L. Taylor

How often has not the parallel been drawn and the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye, notwithstanding that the social diagnosis could yield no other verdict than 'rotten to the very core'? ~ Abraham Kuyper

Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. ~ George Lakoff

Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. ~ J. Cammenga

I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

I believe in maximum flexibility, so I reserve the right to change my position on any subject when the external environment relating to any topic changes too. ~ Henry Earl Singleton

The man or the woman who can display the nonviolence of the brave can easily stand against as external invasion. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who's stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it's that you're not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it? - But there are insuperable obstacles. Then it's not a problem. The cause of your inaction lies outside you. - But how can I go on living with that undone? Then depart, with a good conscience, as if you'd done it, embracing the obstacles too. ~ Marcus Aurelius

How far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act? ~ Brian W. Aldiss

To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world ~ Jim Holt

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same ... happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture. ~ Gregory Benford

Be a light unto yourself; betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the Truth. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves. ~ Buddha Shakyamuni

The body is the external coating and the mind is the internal coating of the Atman who is the real perceiver, the real enjoyer, the being in the body who is working the body by means of the internal organ or the mind. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Our external reality is exactly what we are at that moment in time; history and the future are irrelevant. ~ James A. Levine

I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next. ~ Peter Medawar

This book is about those other pieces, and getting them in place. It's about understanding the external myths that have broken down; the same ones that created the massive American middle class, which is now dying, and left us with the Choose Yourself era in the fallout. People are walking around blind. If you are the one who can see, you will be able to navigate through this new world. You will be the beacon that will enhance the lives of everyone around you and, in doing so, trigger the actual law of nature that says when you enhance everyone around you, you can't help but enhance yourself. ~ James Altucher

One of its (civilisations) most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised, with those who do not -or cannot be trusted to - share our values. Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation. ~ Mary Beard

Deconstruction seeks neither to reframe art with some perfect, apt and truthful new frame, nor simply to maintain the illusion of some pure and simple absence of a frame. Rather it shows that the frame is, in a sense, also inside the painting. For the frame is what "produces" the object of art, is what sets it off as an object of art - an aesthetic object. Thus the frame is essential to the work of art; in the work of art. Paint a $5,000 abstract painting on a railroad boxcar and nobody will pay a cent for it. Take a torch, remove the panel of the boxcar, install it in a gallery, and it will be worth $5,000. It will be art because it is now framed by the gallery. But at the same moment that the frame encloses the work in its own protected enclosure, making it a work of art, it becomes merely ornamental - external to the work of art. Thus is the frame central or marginal? Is the frame inside the work of art, essential to it, or outside the work of art, extrinsic to it? ~ James N. Powell

A "Wait and See" approach to an external factor is not strategic ~ Fritz Shoemaker

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical. ~ Eugenio Montale

All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity. ~ George Washington

After I received my blue belt, I soon recognized that the belts were simply an external representation of an inner experience, and that they mattered little compared to the person I was becoming. ~ Chris Matakas

There aren't that many policy changes you can do, so I'd say you ride the wave and hope that maybe some of the external events help you. ~ Brad Carson

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the 'external' elements of linguistics from the 'internal' elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

We are each of us the result of billions of years of the universe evolving toward its own splendor. And evolution builds: the very mitochondria that power our cells and give us life once existed as separate organisms that first infected our pre–pre–human ancestors and then became one with them. We each contain not only the slime mold and the worm, the fish and amphibian and reptile, but the pig and the ape and the barely human. If we look hard enough, we can discern hundreds of parts: kings and queens, warriors and troubadours, mages, bullies, and saints. And hustlers, adventurers, survivors, rebels, reactionaries, and rogues. And the part of us that wants to be more than human, or rather more fully human. I believe that we need to enlist all these separate selves into a single army of free companions who respect each other and love each other to the death. And who are willing to devote their lives to fight together in order to win a shared splendor.
I will return to this theme of integration again and again, for it is key to everything. All of my characters struggle with themselves, and face as well external obstacles such as exploding stars or dragons or icy wastelands cold enough to freeze the breath. Maram, who writes poems glorifying his second chakra (the body's sexual center), pants like a dog after every enticing woman he sees. Even as he resists his essential nobility and destiny as a hero, he insists that every man deserves at least one vice. When it is pointed ~ David Zindell

My personal convictions drive me to join those like-minded, in the recruitment of a growing army without guns, no hatred or prejudice, but with a leadership voice of influence and harnessing resources to create the change they desire. The major problems facing the world, particularly our beloved African continent, will not be won by sanctions, cruelty, ethnic cleansing, revenge, guns or bullets. The challenges are not largely externally motivated, so the platform to change them must shift. Shift from selfish to selfless, from external to internal, from behaviours to beliefs. Some of them are externally sponsored but self-inflicted, whilst most of them are due to greed, short-sightedness, abuse and selfishness. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Read people by their surroundings, their personally designed environments. Like external body language, a room and how its arranged tells you things without speaking. ~ Jarod Kintz

I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again,–that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them. ~ John Locke

We can change the way that we think about external events, even where we cannot change them. And we can do something more. We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy. ~ Richard Koch

It is clear, then, that the desire for certainty shapes our spaces of possibility, our perceptions, and our lives both personally and professionally. Usually, this need saves us. But it also sabotages us. This produces an ongoing tension between what we might think of as our conscious selves and our automatic selves. To overcome our inborn reflex that pushes us to seek certainty (sometimes at any cost), we must lead with our conscious selves and tell ourselves a new story, one that with insistent practice will change our future past and even our physiological responses. We must create internal and external ecologies that… celebrate doubt!
This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn't actually our environment as such, or our" intelligence, or even - ironically - the challenge of reaching the mythical "aha" moment. Rather, it is the nature of human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity ~ Beau Lotto

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. ~ George Santayana

Mangrove destruction is not only an ecological threat to a valuable ecosystem but also a social threat for [the poor]. External debt pressure on exporting countries, neo-liberal doctrines and ecological blindness of northern importing consumers, together with a flagrant lack of local governmental action to protect the environment in most shrimp-producer countries, are the main driving forces of mangrove destruction. ~ Joan Martinez-Alier

Do your fears warn of external dangers? Or, are they the kind that keep you from becoming more of your true self? ~ Gina Greenlee

Your personality of the mind is like a castle of sand around the sea. The time you begin to disassociate yourself with different experiences and impressions of both the external and internal world, you won't find anything inside. ~ Roshan Sharma

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, "culture" is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts ~ Wendy Brown

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words "I" and "myself " must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many "growing communities" are as disastrous as cancer. ~ Alan W. Watts

The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body's direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body's response to thought. Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the filter of a mental interpretation, the future of thought, that is to say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike, me and mine. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated - indeed, feverishly nurtured - by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. ~ Scott Anderson

The reason is that for so many years he has been developing a deep reserve of internal calm, so deep that the external unrest cannot disturb it. Interior calm gives birth to calm action. ~ Matthew Kelly

He said, aloud, 'The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inward, always inwards. ~ Penelope Fitzgerald

There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other external; religious control and political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of [external, i.e., political control] falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If civilized man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense. ~ Juan Donoso Cortes

The egos manifest with feelings and emotions and this gives us a false perception of reality. We therefore don't see reality clearly as it is, but see external forms and events colored by the subjective feelings within us.

When we do perceive reality however, we do so with consciousness and the mind is able to clearly interpret it. The less the feelings of the egos are present, the clearer our perception of the present moment is, which means the clearer we are able to see any situation, issue, or person at the time we have to deal with them, and we are also more able to perceive the beauty of the moment. ~ Belsebuub

If you don't have the treasure of Noble truth, you are still poor even if you have loads of money and wealth. Because external wealth are belongs to this world. You have to leave them here. ~ Suman Jyoty Bhante

I believe there's nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who's got the hallucination. ~ Richard P. Feynman

When one fierce passion is devouring the soul, we feel more than ever the necessity of external excitement; and our dependence on the world for temporary relief increases in direct proportion to our contempt of the world and all its works. He ~ Charles Robert Maturin

Sunshine, external, is universal; internal, the eternal. Choose; shine. ~ Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma

[E]ach of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I can't even find the model by which to live outside myself. I can only find it within. ~ Charles Taylor

The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred - and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for the ~ Hannah Arendt

Our country today is at a cross-point of several crises that were triggered by three groups of causes: the effects of the 2008 world crisis, the external political and economic pressure, and the internal problems and constraints that have built up in our economy ~ Dmitry Medvedev

What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something - and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat? ~ Erich Fromm

You can control your power in human form--keep it dormant. But the moment you switch, the moment you get agitated or angry or afraid, the moment you remember how much your power scares you, your magic rises up to protect you. It doesn't understand that YOU are the source of those feelings, not some external threat. When there IS an outside threat, when you forget to fear your power long enough, you have control. ~ Sarah J. Maas

People who suffer from anxiety are very good at hiding it. That can often be a contributor to the anxiety because the gap between the internal perception and the external impression can feel so large. ~ Scott Stossel

Sacrifice of the self is the source of all humiliation, as also on the contrary is the foundation of all true exaltation. The first step will be an inward gaze - an isolating contemplation of ourselves. Whoever stops here has come only halfway. The second step must be an active outward gaze - autonomous, constant observation of the external world.
No one will ever achieve excellence as an artist who cannot depict anything other than his own experiences, his favorite objects, who cannot bring himself to study assiduously even a quite strange object, which does not interest him at all, and to depict it at leisure. An artist must be able and willing to depict everything. This is how a great artistic style is created, which rightly is so much admired in Goethe. ~ Novalis

God wanted Israel, as He wants Christians, to learn to utterly abhor and detest anything that had the potential of coming between them and their God. The believer's enemies are typically internal rather than external, and they pose a powerful threat to spiritual health and progress. ~ Max Anders

The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant 'identity' ('this is your duty as an American', 'you must commit these acts as a Muslim', or 'as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement') is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs). ~ Amartya Sen

Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters. ~ Lev S. Vygotsky

There is more to fearlessness than merely having overcome fear ... This state of being is not dependent on any external circumstances. It is individual dignity ... that comes from being what we are, right now. ~ Chogyam Trungpa