John Bruna Quotes

Compassion is often confused with pity. But when we pity someone, we see ourselves in a superior position. The immeasurable attitude of compassion arises from the recognition of our shared humanity. ~ John Bruna

Today is sacred - for it will never come again. What could be more important than living this day with attention and the intention to be of benefit, to the best of your ability, to all you encounter? ~ John Bruna

Every thought, word, and action plants seeds in the garden of your life. Are you planting seeds of love, compassion, peace, or those of anger, resentment and dissatisfaction? Choose wisely and tend your garden well. ~ John Bruna

When you look back at the painful and difficult events of your life, you find that they were the times of your greatest personal growth. The challenges of our lives provide us the opportunity to develop our highest potentials. ~ John Bruna

When we forgive others, we give ourselves permission to let go of our own suffering. ~ John Bruna

There is no inner peace found in taking care of me and mine. It is present in attending to the needs of we and ours. ~ John Bruna

Instead of seeing the life you want to live in the distant future, just start living the life you want today. It is really that simple, and that challenging. The only one standing in your way is you. ~ John Bruna

Doing the next "right thing" will always bring more genuine happiness than simply doing the next fun thing. ~ John Bruna

Truly listening, attentively, and with care, is one of the simplest and most kind gifts we can give anyone. ~ John Bruna

While there is always room for improvement and personal growth, it is important to remember that you are enough in this moment - just as you are. ~ John Bruna

Obstacles in your life are not in your way, they are the way. ~ John Bruna

Patience is an action and a skill to be cultivated. It actually solves more problems that most other actions. ~ John Bruna

The doors that open and close in our lives are not nearly as important as the person we are when we open them. ~ John Bruna

Though you may feel that you cannot improve the world, you can always improve yourself. In doing so, the world becomes a better place. ~ John Bruna

The amount of competition is just literally insane. ~ John Landgraf

Prayer is a shield to the soul ~ John Bunyan

You hear a lot about the benefits of insanity or whatever - like, Dr. Karen Singh had once told me this Edgar Allan Poe quote: "The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence." I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn't make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does. ~ John Green

The Recent Past

Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.
As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling
The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear,
The oddest device can't be usual. And that is where
The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars
There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee
Between the blinding rain that interviews.

You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you
Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass
Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader
Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed
How it was a rhyme for "brick" or "redder."
The next chapter told all about a brook.
You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave
Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out "Aladdin."
I thought about the Arab boy in his cave
But the thoughts came faster than advice.
If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space
The print could rhyme with "fallen star. ~ John Ashbery

Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another. ~ John Henry Newman

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive. ~ John F. Kennedy

As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery. ~ John Donne

My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things. ~ John Marsden

Aren't you a little young to be a captain? Not that I'm sure you weren't wonderful at it," I added hastily, "but Frank's got to be your same age, and Mr. Graces and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?"
He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss.
"The title is honorary," he said, not meeting my gaze. "I can't stop them calling me that, even though I've asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the…accident."
Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn't want to tell me because it would make me hate him.
Recognizing that dropping that particular topic-for now at least-would probably be best. I said, "John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos-just this one time, to help Alex-and I'll never mention going there again. I'll even," I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, "forgive you for the waffles-"
John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings.
"Pierce," he said. "Do you mean that?"
When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned.
"You'll never mention going back ~ Meg Cabot

I'm a huge movie nerd. ~ John Corey Whaley

It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor ~ John Cleese

Poem
Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view.
The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear.
On the last mile to Huesca,
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear, that I
Sense you at my side.
And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don't forget my love. ~ John Cornford

Don't get me wrong: I would love to be president. ~ John Bolton

Most medical physicists work in the physics of radiation oncology making sure that the desired dose is given to the cancer and the dose to normal tissues are minimized. ~ John Cameron

Racism is nothing more than ignorance, we are in the dessert together at one time in our lives, we got segregated by peoples beliefs of what was true of what we have to have and don't have to have so for me it is all about education. ~ John Assaraf

No one should be allowed to stand for Parliament without proof that he has taken responsibility for other people. ~ John Rhys-Davies

All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent ~ John Steinbeck

Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be? O wilt thou therefore rise from me? Why should we rise, because 'tis light? Did we lie down, because 'twas night? Love which in spite of darkness brought us hither Should in despite of light keep us together. ~ John Donne

But when the wizard is onstage as the main character, you have to adopt what I call the Jack Vance Rule. I call it this because Jack Vance is the first author successfully and adroitly to have applied this rule in his The Dying Earth. The Jack Vance Rule is: (1) The wizard has to be able to do something unusual, or else he is not a wizard, (2) he cannot do everything, or else there is no drama; therefore (3) the story teller has to communicate to the reader whatever the dividing line is that separates what the wizard can do from what he cannot do, so that the reader can have a reasonable expectation of knowing what the wizard can and cannot do. ~ John C. Wright

Through the Spirit, Jesus Christ the exalted one generates a new mode of common human life, the life of the Church. To participate in that common human life, hearing the gospel in fellowship under the word of God and living together under the signs of baptism and the Lord's supper, is to exist in a sphere in which God's limitless power is unleashed and extends into the entirety of human life: moral, political, cultural, affective, intellectual. Reason, like everything else, is remade in the sphere of the Church; and theological reason is an activity of the regenerate mind turned towards the gospel of Jesus Christ, which constitutes the Church's origin and vocation. ~ John Webster

We must remember that Satan has his miracles, too. ~ John Calvin

Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said.
"Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. ~ John Green

Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky - blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass. ~ John Sandford

The problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make the world more humane again. ~ John Maeda

It never ceases to amaze me that Hollywood made "Pretty Woman," a love story between a hooker and her john. ~ Andrew Goldman

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism. ~ John Derbyshire

John the Baptist never performed any miracles. Yet, he was greater than any of the Old Testament prophets. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

[People] are beginning to awaken to an idea we gave meaning to in the sixties: We are one people, one family, the human family, and what affects one of us affects us all. ~ John Lewis

I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public - that is to say, if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted. ~ John Gurdon

We don't know how to insult you any more' (Inter fan banner, directed at their own team) ~ John Foot

Presidential campaign getting kind of ugly, did you hear about this? Yesterday, a 27-year-old woman came for to deny rumors that she had an affair with Democratic front-runner John Kerry. The woman added, 'I would never cheat on Bill Clinton.' ~ Conan O'Brien

Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert. ~ John Stossel

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past. ~ John Logan

Very often the opinion of the clients must be disregarded in their own interest. ~ John Mercer Johnson

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics. ~ John Robert Seeley

Back From Vacation"
"Back from vacation", the barber announces,
or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.
They are amazed to find the workaday world
still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,
their customers having hardly missed them, and
there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,
the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,
the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved
in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,
the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.
But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.
Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,
warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small,
the evidence says, though their hearts cry, "Not so! ~ John Updike

The AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fueled by stigma, by hate, by misinformation, by ignorance, by indifference. Science has accomplished miracles over the past 20 years, and science can now end this disease - but it cannot end the epidemic. We need more than medicine. We can do something about these things. We need to speak out about the changes we need to make in our society. ~ Elton John

Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity. ~ John Ashbery

Maybe there wasn't, after all, a clear motivation for any of the things that people did. Maybe they just did them for no reason at all or because of stupidity or selfishness or cowardice or anger or for reasons that made no rational sense - because the clouds happened to be a particularly gloomy shade of gray that day, because the barking of an old dog chained to a sycamore tree just happened to sound exactly like the crunch of soldiers' boots on gravel or the hum of bees like an engine in the head driving you mad. ~ John Gregory Brown

If we are part of nature, then we are synonymous with it at the metaphysical level, every bit as much as the first all-but-inorganic animalcules that ever formed a chain of themselves in the blow hole of a primordial sea vent. There is no magic rod that comes down three hundred thousand years ago and divides our essence from the material world that produced us. This means that we cannot speak in essential terms of nature - neither of its brutality nor of its beauty - and hope to say anything true, if what we say isn't true of ourselves.

The importance of that proposition becomes clear only when it's reversed: What's true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. As far as Rafinesque was concerned, it was just hard science. That part is mysterious. "She lives her life not as men or birds," said Rafinesque, "but as a world. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

but that they would be forced to participate in or help celebrate ~ John Corvino

The only riots were the people trying to get tickets. ~ John Guare

Knowledge is not enough to get desired results. You must have the more elusive ability to teach and to motivate. This defines a leader; if you can't teach and you can't motivate, you can't lead. ~ John Wooden

The documented incidences of voter fraud are very rare, yet throughout the country, forces have mobilized in over 30 states to stop it. These efforts are very partisan. ~ John Lewis

And I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure. ~ John Green

If another memo could possibly be sent out, this one specific to smokers: You cannot be both an unwashed bohemian and Cary Grant. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Analog was perfected over 70 years, though. Digital will one day be fantastic. I'm sure of it. ~ John Vanderslice

For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life. ~ John Palfrey

The day women stop reading - that's the day the novel dies! ~ John Irving