Reshaping Quotes

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action. ~ Marshall McLuhan

This process, this method necessary to man's survival and prosperity upon the earth, has often been derided as unduly or exclusively "materialistic." But it should be clear that what has happened in this activity proper to man's nature is a fusion of "spirit" and matter; man's mind, using the ideas it has learned, directs his energy in transforming and reshaping matter into ways to sustain and advance his wants and his life. Behind every "produced" good, behind every man-made transformation of natural resources, is an idea directing the effort, a manifestation of man's spirit. ~ Murray Rothbard

I try to get people thinking, to consider their pasts and presents, ultimately encouraging them and giving them the tools to embrace the work of reshaping their lives. ~ John Bradshaw

I knew too well the nature of life's distractions and enticements-how the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises. ~ Amor Towles

To learn is as beautiful as to live.
Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great. ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Scientific Socialists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis. Darwin influenced the nationalist writer Heinrich von Treitschke and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who influenced Hitler and also the milieu in which he flourished. ~ Marilynne Robinson

No longer can America afford to have its citizenry sit on the sidelines of the community watching while "activists" and others take over the nation, reshaping it into a distinctly destructive environment. ~ Daniel Rundquist

Life is learning how to deal with traffic. It requires patience, a good sense of timing, and sometimes not giving in to the traffic but reshaping your life. ~ Frederick Lenz

In the case of guilt, however, the stand one takes is a stand to one's self. What is even more important, fate cannot be changed; otherwise it would not be fate. Man, however, may well change himself, otherwise he would not be man. It is a prerogative of being human, and a constituent of human existence, to be capable of shaping and reshaping oneself. In other words, it is a privilege of man to become guilty, and his responsibility to overcome guilt. [...] As Max Scheler also pointed out, man has a right to be considered guilty and to be punished. Once we deal with man as the victim of circumstances and their influences, we not only cease to treat him as a human being but also lame his will to change. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

For the academic the rhetorical sense of superiority through the possession of knowledge is essential for facing the daily grind, turning again to the otherwise boring article, braving the students who, fresh as each class may be, will still ask the same questions year after year. Psychological survival is not achieved without effort, and the environment must be managed, knocked about with one's elbows until it takes a shape comfortable to one's sense of self. This is not selfishness, for in reshaping the environment the academic is also reinvigorating the educational process. ~ Robin Winks

By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world's land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia's mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I have been constantly shaping and reshaping my career. I laid a foundation by doing respectful work in all media. And I am happy with what I have done. ~ Colman Domingo

There's a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating that focused attention leads to the reshaping of the brain. In animals rewarded for noticing sound (to hunt or to avoid being hunted, for example), we find much larger auditory centers in the brain. In animals rewarded for sharp eyesight, the visual areas are larger. Brain scans of violinists provide more evidence, showing dramatic growth and expansion in regions of the cortex that represent the left hand, which has to finger the strings precisely, often at very high speed. Other studies have shown that the hippocampus, which is vital for spatial memory, is enlarged in taxi drivers. The point is that the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly. ~ Wendell Berry

Perhaps the most overpowering contrast [with the West] is the virtual absence in premodern China of the idea of a transcendent creator God who is distinct from Nature in a fundamental qualitative sense. The Chinese had notions of a supreme god in various guises (that is, 'hypatotheism'), and also, as we have seen, of a somewhat demiurge-like 'transformer' constantly reshaping the cosmos. ~ Mark Elvin

The pot-thrower in the hut behind the shop, hands and forearms slick with clay, dreaming, yes, of the years in which a life took shape, when each press of a fingertip sent a deep track across a once smooth surface, changing the future, reshaping the past, and was this not as much chance as design? For all that intent could score a path, that the ripples sent up and down and outward could be surmised by decades of experience, was the outcome ever truly predictable? ~ Steven Erikson

The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well
work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece
suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience. ~ Stephen Sondheim

If as individuals we can improve the geography only slightly, if at all, perhaps the more appropriately scaled subject for reshaping is ourselves. ~ Robert Adam

Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life. ~ Stanley Kubrick

The Mesh is reshaping how we go to market, who we partner with and how we invite participation and engage new customers ... If you embrace the Mesh youll discover how your business can inspire customers in a world where access trumps ownership. ~ Lisa Gansky

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives ~ Joseph Beuys

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream."
"I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge. ~ Sebastian Faulks

Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Corollary to acknowledging the political purposes of foreign aid is a clear recognition of the fact that a meaningful and effective aid program, far from avoiding intervention in the affairs of the recipient, in fact constitutes intervention of a most profound character. Its purposes is nothing less than the reshaping of a society, of its internal life and, in less obvious ways, of its relations with the outside world. Indeed the determinant of our aid - of whether or not we extend it and whether or not a country will wish to have it - must be the kind of internal changes it can be expected to bring about and the effect which these changes will have on the interests of both the donor and the recipient.
The question, therefore, is not one of intervention or nonintervention per se but of the ends and means of intervention. ~ J. William Fulbright

We live, therefore, between Easter and the consummation, following Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and commissioned to be for the world what he was for Israel, bringing God's redemptive reshaping to our world.

Christians have always found it difficult to understand and articulate this, and have regularly distorted the picture in one direction or the other.

[ ... ]

When God does what God intends to do, this will be an act of fresh grace, of radical newness. At one level it will be quite unexpected, like a surprise party with guests we never thought we would meet and delicious food we never thought we would taste. But at the same time there will be a rightness about it, a rich continuity with what has gone before so that in the midst of our surprise and delight we will say, 'Of course! This is how it had to be, even though we'd never imagined it. ~ N. T. Wright

Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don't think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props with us into the future, and out of those props we make a model, some stage set, and that's our version of the past. Of course models decay, and they change. And so we're constantly reshaping the past. Because the past is us. The past is our foundation. ~ John Banville

There were no ugly gods. Their first expression of power was in the reshaping of their selves, into forms lovely to behold. ~ Steven Erikson

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life - they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat - however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it. ~ Boris Pasternak

Our ability to understand ourselves is now expanding beyond the information that we can receive from our five senses. We're becoming aware of ourselves as more than minds and bodies. We are becoming aware of ourselves as souls while we simultaneously have personalities and walk upon the earth. That is the huge transformation that is reshaping the human experience - the expansion of our perceptual capability beyond the five senses. We're becoming multisensory. ~ Gary Zukav

Nonetheless, as Seattle's leaders and residents would discover, this new urban environment was a palimpsest of exploitation, conflict, compromise, adaptation, and defeat. Physical forces and creatures beyond human control always pushed back. So, too, did the people who suffered from the changes. The new urban ecology was never the result of purely natural forces but the combination of human power magnified or thwarted by an unpredictable physical environment. The non-human environment that enfolded the city was not predetermined, nor was the poverty that the decades of shaping and reshaping Seattle had aggravated. In the end, the ecology of urban poverty was altogether a human creation. ~ Matthew Klingle

Even cliffs are vulnerable, Captain Eversea, she thought. The sea gets at them, eventually, reshaping them inexorably, giving them no choice at all in the matter. ~ Julie Anne Long

With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

I intend to protect a free and open internet, extend its reach to every classroom, and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks, so that the next generation of digital innovators and entrepreneurs have the platform to keep reshaping our world. ~ Barack Obama

By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.' ~ Virginia Postrel

The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have. ~ Milton Friedman

As a species, we tend to be doers, forever shaping and reshaping the world to better suit our purposes. ~ Mariella Frostrup

As women slowly gain power, their values and priorities are reshaping the agenda. A multitude of studies show that when women control the family funds, they generally spend more on health, nutrition, and education - and less on alcohol and cigarettes. ~ Dee Dee Myers

History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images. ~ Anselm Kiefer

Today's free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them. This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it. ~ Rebecca Traister

If reshaping a life style boils down to pretending and dwindling into a world of make-believe, living may turn into a schizophrenic merry-go-round and the real self might be crunched and munched on, piece by piece. ("He did not know that she knew") ~ Erik Pevernagie

It is seldom indeed that a composition which was poor when the picture was taken can be improved by reshaping it in the dark room. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you devote yourself to God, then He in turn will continually stay with you, as an eternal candle flame stays with a wick, feeding off the overflow of wax; yet reshaping into something better. ~ Anthony Liccione

[Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles' worth of campaign cash – that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there's no other explanation that makes any sense. ~ Matt Taibbi

Changing entrenched systems is daunting; the odds against reshaping the nation's police forces are high. But there are few things more important than making sure their profession is the brave, honorable service it should be. We have to do it, or watch our communities and our democracy disintegrate. ~ Ann Medlock

Whether the labor unions and the socialists yesterday, or NGOs and
human rights activists today, these forces increasingly tend to provide the
external envelope of a power reshaping polities, societies, and economies on
a global scale according to the prescriptions of a new reason of State. ~ Nicolas Guilhot

She loved [her daughters]. More than that, she admired them. They would be better than she was: stronger and smarter, more capable and less afraid, and if the world displeased them, they would change it, cracking it open, reshaping it, instead of bending themselves to its demands. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Jesus wasn't so much handing out information as reshaping our imaginations. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

For this reason I get impatient with people who depict Marx's dialectic as a closed method of analysis. It is not finite; on the contrary, it is constantly expanding, and here he is explaining precisely how. We only have to review what we have already experienced in reading Capital; the movement of its argument is a perpetual reshaping, rephrasing and expansion of the field of contradictions. ~ David Harvey

My feelings are intelligent, directive, and revealing
From the inside out they rise, flow, reveal
Uncovering, releasing, freeing
Reshaping my experience
Lifting my mood ~ Deborah Sandella

The seventh lesson is about alchemy. By any measure, alchemy is magical. You can't turn lead into gold by heating it, beating it, molding it into different shapes, or combining it with any known substance. Those are simply physical changes. Likewise, you will never cause an inner transformation by taking your old self and hammering it with criticism, heating it up with exciting experiences, reshaping how you look physically, or connecting with new people. How, then, does the magic work? It works according to the principles that make up the universe's operating system. When you consciously align with them, you give yourself an opening for transformation. ~ Deepak Chopra

another drawback is inadequate training. Management training on a regular basis is a sine-qua-non for good performance in management. The principles of management are basically the same as they involve men, money and materials. Applications vary slightly depending on the nature of what is being managed, at what level and for what purpose. New ideas, innovations and new practices may emerge from time to time which a manager needs to be conversant with. Otherwise he will be way behind or even obsolete. Training and exposure act as tonic for renewal and reshaping of a manager. There can be no adequate substitute for such training, interaction and exposure until one ceases to be an active manager. To think that once one is in management position, there is no further need for training through formal and informal interaction and exposure is, I believe, the height of folly. ~ Olusegun Obasanjo

Becoming a strategic thinker is about opening your mind to possibilities. It's about seeing the bigger picture. It's about understanding the various parts of your business, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again in a more powerful way. It's about insight, invention, emotion and imagination focused on reshaping some part of the world. ~ Max McKeown

No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket. ~ Pete Dexter

In popular books and articles, information technology writer Carr has worried over the ways that algorithms like those employed by Google are reshaping the ways we think. ~ Nicholas G. Carr

Then I wake up. And, it's not the purple- hued light of the house at three in the morning that has woken me, or the sound of Payton stumbling into the bathroom. It's a hand.
A single hand.
So innocuous.
I feel it before my eyes blink open. A slight weight on my hip. A current of electricity running through me, reshaping the air that I breathe. It takes only a second for me to process what it is, to rearrange the spaces in my head around the feel of his fingers on my body. ~ Autumn Doughton