Impoverished Lives Quotes

Why do most people think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe? ~ Poul Anderson

He returned to Pinch, waiting for the mine whistle to break the day into pieces. When it did, the miners surfaced with empty lunch buckets, leaving the portal, walking the narrow main drag with its bank, post office, and commissary. They found their own company shacks in straggling rows three deep, each one identical, with the same stovepipe, same curl of smoke, same yellow dog lazing in a bare yard. its tail beginning to wag. ~ Matthew Neill Null

The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand. If you can't afford an air ticket to Kuala Lumpur, you can always read Conrad and imagine yourself in South-East Asia. If you have been monotonously married for forty years, you can always lay furtive hands on a copy of James Joyce's letters. Literature on this view is a kind of supplement to our unavoidably impoverished lives - a sort of spiritual prosthesis which extends our capabilities beyond their normal restricted range. It is true that everyone's experience is bound to be limited, and that art can valuably augment it. But why the lives of so many people should be imaginatively impoverished is then a question that can be easily passed over. ~ Terry Eagleton

The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life
walking down a high-walled lane with people of our own kind, the
same economic situation, the same national background and
education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all
humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our
restricted and impoverished lives. ~ Florence Luscomb

And then there's another snag you keep coming across: such decent and sensible people keep appearing in life, such wise men, and such lovers of the human race who, throughout their lives, set themselves the very task of conducting themselves as properly and sensibly as possible, as it were to enlighten their neighbors for the very purpose of proving to them that it is really possible to live decently and sensibly on this earth. And so?It is well known that, sooner or later, towards the ends of their lives, many of these people have betrayed themselves by committing some ludicrous act or another, at times even of the most indecent sort. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way. ~ Missy Mazzoli

The best way to uplift our own lives is to do all we can to uplift the lives of others. ~ Sharon Gannon

Their plan had been very simple: to stay together for the rest of their lives. ~ Cecelia Ahern

There are people who come into our lives as welcome as a cool breeze in summer- and last about as long. ~ Richard Paul Evans

It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power, which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives. ~ Slavoj Zizek

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing afriend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."

- Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation ~ Chief Tecumseh Shawnee Nation

The world would hate His followers, not because of evil in their lives, but precisely because of the absence of evil or rather their goodness. Goodness does not cause hatred, but it gives occasion for hatred to manifest itself. The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

I also came to understand that our authenticity (or lack thereof) is made evident by the fruit that our life is bearing. ~ Christine Caine

Within our working lives, and perhaps even amongst friends, we see deceptions played out before our eyes: people who pretend to be happy when they are aching with sadness, or to like each other when they feel nothing but contempt. Perhaps these are actions of self-preservation, driven by a will to hide our pain from a wider audience. Within a relationship, though, pretence is indeed both unreasonable and illogical. Admit to being the person you really are. Never play that deadly game of charades. ~ Rachel Abbott

Love is a choice - not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guide. Love is a conversion to humanity - a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life. ~ Carter Heyward

That was a judicious mother who said, I obey my children for the first year of their lives, but ever after I expect them to obey me. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances to shape our lives by default. ~ Stephen Covey

There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There are certain thing in our lives – certain people - that are just supposed to be there. We don't choose them, or what they'll mean to us; they're just a part of who we are."
…
"And what is it you think I am to you?" …
Without hesitation, she answered, "You're the man I'm meant to love. ~ Kelsey Kingsley

We chased her across the Pont-Neuf and through the Bois de Boulogne, kicking up leaves, and one day we knew that no matter where we might find ourselves in the world, Paris would be an ache in our hearts. Yes, we were young students in Paris. We had gone there because we knew it was the city of love and learning and light. Where it would lead was not as important as where we were at the moment. Looking at the city, we thought we saw our whole lives. Perhaps we did. ~ Karen Schur

Reader, I cannot promise you will be less afraid when you finish this book, but I hope you will feel more able to name what lives inside you. ~ Olivia Gatwood

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else ... ~ Lucy Grealy

We are here to learn lessons and our birth chart tells us what our lessons are, what type of energy we possess in the first place, and how, by facing up to the challenges presented to us in life, spiritual growth will ensue. The birth chart is a 'tool' to guide us through our life. By understanding our basic make up, we can learn to make the most out of our positive points and try to improve on our weaker ones. ~ Stephen Arroyo

The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure. ~ Don McCullin

"People can't die, along the coast," said Mr. Peggotty, "except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood. He's a going out with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide." ~ Charles Dickens

Books are the most important of all my possessions. They capture the thoughts, feelings, dreams and lives of their authors, welcoming us into their worlds and inspiring us to emulate their adventures. ~ Fennel Hudson

I hope my greatest contribution will be to try to extract principles of truth that will cause us to live our lives in a more effective way and to advance Jesus' purpose in the world. ~ Erwin McManus

Anyone who knows he is loved is in turn prompted to love. It is the Lord himself, who loved us first, who asks us to place at the center of our lives love for him and for the people he has loved. It is especially adolescents and young people, who feel within them the pressing call to love, who need to be freed from the widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its commandments and prohibitions, sets too many obstacles in the path of the joy of love and, in particular prevents people from fully enjoying the happiness that men and women find in their love for one another. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it ... you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do. ~ Leon Uris

The claim that SpongeBob makes your child dumber is a causal claim. If you do X, Y will happen. To prove that, you'd have to show that if you forced the children in the no-TV households to watch SpongeBob and changed nothing else about their lives, they would do worse in school. ~ Emily Oster

What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought. ~ Hal Herzog

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile. ~ William Carlos Williams

I think that giant American corporations should start asking themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the ordinary. Clearly people want things that make their lives the way they wish they were. ~ John Peterman

Beautiful features, always immaculately dressed, the kind of woman that makes a great impression. Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women's colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. They then devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools. As he sat there, Tsukuru pondered the kind of lives they led. ~ Haruki Murakami

There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here. ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

The power of television - it's so present in our lives, we don't even know how powerful it is. ~ Melissa Leo

Whatever response we draw, we've got to know this: evangelism is not easy. It's not supposed to be. It's challenging to tell someone that he or she is lost, in danger of coming judgment, and in need of wholehearted repentance. That's not a light and airy message. It's a world-changing message, one that calls our entire lives into question. It's a loving message, but love in a biblical sense is not mushy or weak. Biblical love is transformative, powerful, renewing, redeeming, cleansing. ~ Owen Strachan

Robert, have you seen those great black ants which are born with wings? They fly a day or two, then drop their wings and fall upon the ground to crawl for all their lives. I wonder when your son will drop his wings. Is it not strange, Robert, how, among men, this crawling is revered--how children tear at their wings, so they may indulge in this magnificent crawling?" "What makes boys grow to men?" Robert asked. "What circumstances rots out their wing roots?" "Why a great many never have wings, and some tear them off for themselves; some are sudden things and others very tedious. ~ John Steinbeck

Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.

Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflecting on others the very same carnage once inflicted on them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again - she knew them only as Widow This or Widow That - but she'd never met a Widower Anything. ~ Omar El Akkad

I believe we create our own lives. And we create it by our thinking, feeling patterns in our belief system. I think we're all born with this huge canvas in front of us and the paintbrushes and the paint, and we choose what to put on this canvas. ~ Louise L. Hay

It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives. ~ Walter Lippmann

There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I was angry about injustice
about the uncaring way the world works. I knew a lot of ordinary people had died that day, not because of fire or falling masonry but because of their compassion. It was their desperate attempts to save other human being
often total strangers
that ended up costing them their own lives. ~ Terry Hayes

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god - Society, The State, The Government, The Commune - must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

It is this perfect accuracy, this lack of play, of variety, that makes the machine-made article so lifeless. Wherever there is life there is variety, and the substitution of the machine-made for the hand-made article has impoverished the world to a greater extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier period. ~ Harold Speed

How often, in our Christian lives, do we settle for a "snack"
something quick
instead of feasting on all we have in Jesus? Are we looking into the Word, considering all we have been given, gazing at the cross in gratefulness? Jesus didn't just set us free from bondage
He gave us an inheritance. He didn't simply pay our debt
He gave us His bank account of righteousness. He didn't merely release us from Satan's grip
He asked us to be His bride. He takes us from dungeon to palace. Ashes to beauty. Rejected to cherished. Starving to feasting. ~ Grace Mally

The chi is the central energy or power that we use in physical expression. When the chi is flowing properly in our lives, we can be very adept athletically. ~ Frederick Lenz

We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skill ... we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up. ~ Esther Forbes

In a way, she's saved you. I've always said people walk into our
lives for a reason. She walked into yours to help you break free from all of
this, Marcus. Then I thought maybe, just maybe, it's not too late. ~ E.L.Montes