Responding Quotes

One conceit of economics is that markets as a whole can perform fairly rationally, even if many of the participants within them are irrational. But irrational behavior in the markets may result precisely because individuals are responding rationally according to their incentives. ~ Nate Silver

Your grandma is a magician. Remember that time when you fell off your bicycle and she lifted you up onto the kitchen counter? She cleaned your bloody knees, washed the tears and snot off your face, told you funny stories and tickled your stomach until you giggled so hard it made you hiccup. The tears, the blood, the pain, your mum's closed bedroom door - all vanished, as if your grandma had waved a wand - sim sala bim! Hard to keep your smile off your face now, no? She did such things. Still does. A trickster, she is. Always full of pranks and laughter. Like now, looking so wrinkled and pale in her bed, not responding. Bet she opens her eyes any moment now with that mischievous grin of hers, pleased she fooled you. You'll both double over in laughing fits. Any moment now.
From: "Grandma's Tricks", In-flight literary magazine issue 4 2015 ~ Margrét Helgadóttir

All prayer is responding to God. In all cases God is the initiator - "hearing" always precedes asking. God comes to us first or we would never reach out to him.92 Yet all prayers are not alike or equally effective in relating to God. The clearer our understanding of who God is, the better our prayers. Instinctive prayer is like an emergency flare in reaction to a general sense of God's reality. Prayer as a spiritual gift is a genuine, personal conversation in reply to God's specific, verbal revelation. ~ Timothy J. Keller

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
- Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray; quoted in: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffmann ~ Albert Einstein

Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment. ~ M. Scott Peck

I look at my snow boots, counting the grommets while I try to name what I'm feeling. This has been a problem lately. It's never been a problem before - I've been happy, and sad, and frustrated.
I've felt angry and sentimental.
I've loved. I've been loved back.
Maintaining long moments of wordless eye contact with the man who is supposed to make me feel okay about going blind, noticing all the exact shades of blue and how I can always tell he's going to smile before he does, pretending I'm not responding to some tension between us?
I'm a little exhausted. ~ Mary Ann Rivers

We must remember that democracy works when given time to develop, mature and deliver. People must have access to information for informed debate. Government institutions must treat citizens fairly, and with dignity, while responding to their needs. ~ Atifete Jahjaga

We "activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies," Sapolsky writes, "but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions. ~ Paul Tough

Personality Self/ Ego Spiritual Self /Higher Soul/God Not recognizing the divinity in yourself or others Recognizing divinity in self and all living things Seeing yourself as separate from everything Knowing you are connected to everything Focuses on differences Recognizes similarities Intellect (Mind) Intuition (Heart) Hostility Compassion Re-Action Responding with awareness Past or Future Fully in the present moment Fear (false evidence appearing real) Courage Judgment Acceptance Right/Wrong Everything is an experience to learn from, both negative and positive. Better/Worse Everything has value. ~ Sabrina Reber

There certainly are situations where I feel not empowered or uninspired. Particularly when the person's agenda is to intimidate through abusing their position or their authority. When I am present and in a nonreactive state, then I can become like snake and slide through their "intimidation net" back into the creative plane. When I am in a reactive state, I usually regret responding, because usually all that happens is that the intimidator feels righteously vindicated. ~ Tori Amos

Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter. ~ Bell Hooks

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." "Love" is abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing. ~ Erich Fromm

Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment. ~ Lao-Tzu

A player's first move isn't necessarily the truest or clearest view of that person I'll get, but it's often the most naked, because it takes a while to situate yourself within an imaginary landscape. When you respond to the initial subscriber packet with your opening move - when you come to the bridge - you haven't had a chance to get much sense of the game's rhythms, so you're awkward, halting, more likely to overplay your hand. The open path at the overpass gives way to grand schemes, huge, multipart responses, whole narratives from within the canvas newly forming inside the player's imagination. I keep myself out of it; I interpret and react, like a flowchart responding flatly to a person who's asking it how to live. ~ John Darnielle

She was fighting for something, she felt
alive and capable of responding to the challenges facing her. ~ Paulo Coelho

I think my response to hearing that alarm would have been to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life, but over the past 21 years that instinct has been trained out of me and another set of responses has been trained in, represented by three words: warn, gather, work. "Working the problem" is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. We practice the "warn, gather, work" protocol for responding to fire alarms so frequently that it doesn't just become second nature; it actually supplants our natural instincts. ~ Chris Hadfield

One final silly face.
One blessed responding laugh.
Fezzik closed his eyes then, thinking only this: thank God I was a giant after all.... ~ William Goldman

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure ~ Steve Largent

Mindfulness is an invitation to change that pattern and to become aware of where we are and how we got here. Mindfulness gives us a chance to listen to the wisdom of our hearts, to notice with more clarity where we get in our own way, and to shift from reacting out of habit to responding from our intentions. ~ Maia Duerr

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

The spiritual life and especially its expression in mystical experience, is not so much a matter of striving for heights of mystical union between the soul and God who is utterly different from us. It is rather more a matter of attending to God's presence with us and responding to God's presence by being altogether present to the divine presence which is always near. The long history of Christian spirituality has to do with the various ways of responding to God's presence and participating ever more fully in the divine life altogether present in human life, history, the world and the church. ~ Michael Downey

Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance. ~ Tara Brach

Yes, what has happened is we have moved from responding to these terrorist attacks as acts of civil disobedience to getting to the point after September 11 that we said, no, this is not just civil disobedience, this is an act of war. ~ Marsha Blackburn

My main concern is that there is a balance in the system and that some art-based hip-hop can get out to the masses, 'cause right now people are not responding to what they don't know. Most people are just afraid to think on their own. ~ Black Thought

Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet. ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template. ~ Ronald A. Heifetz

If we don't identify our personal sense of shame before responding to our child, we run the risk of allowing our own shame to control the moment of discipline. ~ Heather Davis Nelson

Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. . . . The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge. It was there, facing her, about her, within her. Everything was said by this immense wordless, motionless presence. . . . The wind was still blowing from the summit of the sky, from its dark reaches scarcely marked with the buoys of stars. She was responding to the eyes staring at her, impassive eyes, but whose absolute compassion she sensed. . . . ~ Andrei Makine

I am very different to how people think I am. It's the characters I play that they are responding to. ~ Orlando Bloom

No temptation can gravitate to a man unless there is that is his heart which is capable of responding to it. ~ James Allen

It is only the joy of hearing the gospel and being reminded that our sins are forgiven in Christ that will keep the demands of discipleship from becoming drudgery. It is only gratitude and love to God that comes from knowing that He no longer counts our sins against us (Romans 4:8) that provides the proper motive for responding to the claims of discipleship. ~ Jerry Bridges

Play, Incorporating Animistic and Magical Thinking Is Important Because It:
Fosters the healthy, creative and emotional growth of a child;
Forms the best foundation for later intellectual growth.
Provides a way in which children get to know the world and creates possibilities for different ways of responding to it.
Fosters empathy and wonder. ~ Rachel Carson

The response to Pride has been so overwhelming. I mean, people have really loved it. And it's so rewarding because we had such a fun time making that film, and it was made with so much heart, that it's lovely that people seem to be responding in kind to that. ~ Rosamund Pike

It won't happen anytime soon, don't worry," Berkeley says, amused. "We still have two albums left on our contract, and like I said before, the band's a big business - it supports a lot of people - we're not going anywhere."

"Well, that's a relief. You scared me. I was about to ask if you wouldn't mind autographing my bra so I'd have something to remember you by."

He takes his time responding, his eyes slowly looking me up and down. "But you're not wearing a bra," he finally points out. ~ Katie Delahanty

And she gave herself up to him body and soul, responding to his disarming affection, the bounty of his indefatigable dick, and as always to his arresting strength and beauty. He was her temptation and deliverance. He was her life. ~ C.C. Gibbs

Meaning coming from feeling, feeling coming from within, you absorb a massive amount of information, it goes through your whole body, a little bit of it floats up to your head where there is deliberation. You are conditioned by the way your whole body is responding to what is going on. ~ Bill Henson

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

Each of us is a product of our family, environment, friends, education, culture, and society. These conditions lead to a certain way of seeing things and a certain way of responding to things. When we see this, we have compassion for everyone, including ourselves. We see that if we want something to change, we also have to help change his or her family, environment, friends, education, culture, and society. We are responsible, directly or indirectly, for each person's consciousness attitudes. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

But you can't make war personal," I say, "or you'll never make the right decisions."
"And if you didn't make personal decisions, you wouldn't be a person. All war is personal somehow, isn't it? For somebody? Except it's usually hate."
"Lee - "
"I'm just saying how lucky he is to have someone love him so much they'd take on the whole world." His Noise is uncomfortable, wondering what I'm looking like, how I'm responding. "That's all I'm saying."
"He'd do it for me," I say quietly.
I'd do it for you too, Lee's Noise says.
And I know he would.
But those people who die because we do it, don't they have people who'd kill for them?
So who's right? ~ Patrick Ness

When someone says words that may not feel good in your body, seem sarcastic in tone, and are meant to judge versus uplift you, this only offers you greater opportunities to raise the vibration of your response.

By responding to anyone's criticism with love, compassion and acceptance, you are stepping forward as a master of relationships to create your own experiences, which has nothing to do with how anyone treats you. ~ Matt Kahn

Dillon, all you have in this world, really, are your responses to it. Responses to your feelings and responses to what comes in from outside. You know how adults are always trying to get you to take responsibility? That's all responsibility is, responding to the world, owning your responses. It isn't about taking blame or finding out if something's your fault. ~ Chris Crutcher

In essence, the system of sacrifice provided a metaphor, a method, for the Israelites to reach God, responding to the deep psychological, emotional, and religious needs of the people. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Hebrew word for "sacrifice"; it comes from a verb meaning "to bring near." Thus a sacrifice is that kind of an offering that enables us to approach God. ~ Jacob Milgrom

We depend on one another in very deep and complex ways, yet most boundary discussions are focused on how to cut off or distance ourselves from unwanted behaviors or people. ... Boundary work is just as much about negotiating and asking for what we want and need as what we don't want and don't need. To this end, if we are working towards not just our own individual safety but towards changing the conditions in which people are not safe or are harmed, boundaries are about imagining radical possibilities as much as responding to events in the present. ~ Cristien Storm

The laws of the Universe are responding to me. ~ Esther Hicks

Whatever you want others to be, first be that yourself. Then, you will find others responding in like manner to you. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Encourage your own curiosity; pursue the problems based on that. Don't get diverted by trying to do things for your own advancement. In other words, don't be lured into responding to incentives. ~ James Mirrlees

Environmental policies are not just about good publicity; they are about responding to the moral imperative to address both climate change and resource depletion ... A company culture that is based on measuring everything in purely financial terms will be crippled by a high turnover of staff, customers and suppliers ~ Toby Robins

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children's Christmas special - Oh, wait, I shouldn't say that. I mean, that's not a good word. It's not just "sadness," the way one feels sad at a film or a funeral. It's more of a plummeting quality. Or the way, you know, the way that light gets in winter just before dusk, or the way she is with me.
All right, at the height of lovemaking, you know, the very height, when she's starting to climax, and she's really responding to you now, you know, her eyes widening in that way that's both, you know, surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive could fake or feign if you really look intently at her, really see her. And I don't know, this moment has this piercing sadness to it, of the loss of her in her eyes. And as her eyes, you know, widen to their widest point and as she begins to climax and arch her back, they close. You know, shut, the eyes do. And I can tell that she's closed her eyes to shut me out. You know, I become like an intruder. And behind those closed lids, you know, her eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward into some void where l, who sent them, can't follow. ~ David Foster Wallace

Over the years, many executives have said to me with pride: 'Boy, I worked so hard last year that I didn't take any vacation.' I always feel like responding, You dummy. You mean to tell me you can take responsibility for an eighty-million-dollar project and you can't plan two weeks out of the year to have some fun? ~ Lee Iacocca

When we gather, we are responding to a call to worship; that call is an echo and renewal of the call of creation to be God's image bearers for the world, and we fulfill the mission of being God's image bearers by undertaking the work of culture making. ~ James K.A. Smith

Node.js (or, as it's more briefly called by many, simply "Node") is a server-side solution for JavaScript, and in particular, for receiving and responding to HTTP requests. ~ Brett McLaughlin

In responding to a terrorist attack, there are only two choices - take the fight to the enemy or wait until they hit you again. In my estimation, America chose the first. ~ Kay Granger

I absolutely want and prize and love and revere every single media review I get, but if I got 50 reviews from major newspapers and one review from Amazon, I still would feel a little weird: 'What's going on? Why aren't people responding?' ~ Caroline Leavitt

Morgan and Catcher said their manly hellos - consisting of a symbolic head bob from Catcher (of the "You're in my lair now" variety) and a responding nod from Morgan (of the "You are clearly the king of this castle" variety). ~ Chloe Neill

There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It's not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there's an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It's a very concentrated thing; you can't think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there's such a rich field. It's astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . . but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks fo ~ Alan Lee (artist)

Frasier (Responding to the suggestion that he undertake the difficult work of closure in a relationship): "What you just said about my success made a lot of sense. I tuned you out after that. ~ Frasier Crane

Godliness means responding to God's revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God's Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion. ~ J.I. Packer

Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus following our spiritually-forming text. Liturgy keeps us in touch with all the action that has been and is being generated by the Spirit as given witness in the biblical text. Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption.

Understood this way, 'liturgical' has little to do with choreography in the chancel or an aesthetics of the sublime. It is obedient, participatory, listening to Holy Scripture in the company of the holy community through time (our two-thousand years of responding to this text) and in space (our friends in christ all over the world). High-church Anglicans, revivalistic Baptists, hands-in-the-air praising charismatics, and Quakers sitting in a bare room in silence are all required to read and live this text liturgically, participating in the holy community's reading of Holy Scripture. there is nothing 'churchy' or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic 'story-ing,' making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

We are advancing, we are responding, we are having major apprehensions of the most wanted, most dangerous criminals, overall, we continue to work toward a Mexico of peace that we all want. ~ Enrique Pena Nieto

When you really put your heart and soul into something, the temptation is to try to be in control of circumstances, however you can, and looking and seeing how people are responding. ~ Matt Bomer

When it comes to responding to Jesus, I find it's important to distinguish between reverence, religion, and relationship. ~ Luis Palau

How do I ask my shrink to stop responding to everything I say with, Too much information! and then giggling behind a pillow? ~ Dana Gould

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense - if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example - then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain. ~ Jonah Lehrer

It was quite a sight, Germans dancing, though I was used to it by then. Every now and then there was someone perfectly synchronized with the music, but most of the time I felt like I'd fallen into a colony of robots, each programmed differently and following a separate signal. If you observed them as a group you would never have thought they were responding to the same song. ~ Chloe Aridjis

Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection. ~ Charles Duhigg

Instead of responding to these attacks with a vigorous intellectual counterpunch, many believers grew suspicious of intellectual issues altogether. To be sure, Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in their intellectual pursuits, but this does not mean they should expend no mental sweat of their own in defending the faith ~ J.P. Moreland

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision. ~ Trevor Nunn

I think I've gotten more attention after the Olympics than any other U.S. athlete, and it's really great that people are recognizing who I am and what I do. You look at Shaq and you see a basketball player. You look at Tiger Woods and you see a golfer. But people are responding to who I am. ~ Johnny Weir

Faith is first of all not attachment to a body of doctrines but a process of responding in obedience and trust to God's Word. God has given us the possibility of hearing the Word, since it was spoken in the humanity of Jesus, which we share, and since it continues to be spoken through the Holy Spirit, which dwells in us. So also theology is first of all not the study of doctrines, but a process of reflection on this response in faith. The classic definition of theology, "faith seeking understanding", remains always valid. Faith seeks to understand the one to whom it responds. It also, thereby, seeks to understand itself, and the implications of being so called and so gifted to respond. … Who, then, is qualified for theology? The theological task is implied by the very life of faith itself. Every Christian is therefore called to do theology in this sense. Every Christian must seek an understanding of his or her response to God and the implications of that response for the rest of life. ~ Luke Timothy Johnson

In life, when one gets to the point of a deeper sense of understanding about himself and his purpose, he least explains himself much to people who fail to understand him and his purpose. That must not be interpreted as neither pride nor an uncaring attitude but a great respect for purposefulness ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

With the emergence of the Internet, it has become possible for creative and bold people with focus and determination to establish businesses in some of our remotest communities. But these will not work if they do not have reliable transport routes responding to the impatient modern customer. ~ Johann Lamont

The Universe is responding to who you FEEL you are. ~ Esther Hicks

When we find ourselves irritated, depressed, angry, or ill, we can be sure we have chosen the wrong goal and are responding to fear. ~ Gerald G. Jampolsky

We have so long been subject to external criticism that we don't know how to react to internal criticism, because whereas the most enduring, positive and sensible response to the former is a united front – you shall not divide us, here we stand – responding to the latter is an entirely different ballgame.

This is my fear: that as a community, we don't know how to critique ourselves, and that this is dong us damage. Criticism, and specifically the criticism of both literary publications and the mainstream press, has so long been the weapon of the enemy that our first response on seeing it wielded internally is to call it the work of traitors. We have found strength in the creation of our own conventions and the hallowing of our own legends, flourishing to such an extent that, even if we are not yet accepted into the mainstream literary establishment, we are nonetheless part of the cultural mainstream. We are written about inaccurately, yet we are written about; and if there ever was a time when the whole genre seemed a precarious, faddish endeavour, then that time is surely past.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows

There is an urgent need for the emergence of a new generation of apostles anchored firmly in the word of Christ, capable of responding to the challenges of our times and prepared to spread the Gospel far and wide. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Growth is the process of responding positively to change. ~ Paul Harvey

In the final analysis, that state of abstraction turns out to be a very specific set of conditions: white middle-class women suffering and responding to the sexist attitudes and conduct of white middle-class men and calling for equality with those particular men. This approach leaves the existing socioeconomic system with its fundamental reliance on racism and class bias unchallenged. It ~ Angela Y. Davis

Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there. ~ Anne Rice

For too long we have occupied ourselves with responding to the consequences of cruelty and abuse and have neglected the important task of building up an ethical system in which justice for animals is regarded as the norm rather than the exception. Our only hope is to put our focus on the education of the young. ~ John Hoyt

Love as a disposition does not primarily act on abstract principle. Instead it is a way of seeing habitually and responding to the real,
separate, individual needs of each of the people we encounter in our lives every single day. ~ Roberta C. Bondi

In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, "suffering together" or "empathy," although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others' ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. "Responsiveness" defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge - loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness. ~ Keith Dowman

It is a mistake easily made by every man, saint or scholar, Church leader or day laborer. Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily. The simple soul who each day makes a morning offering of "all the prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" - and who then acts upon it by accepting unquestioningly and responding lovingly to all the situations of the day as truly sent by God - has perceived with an almost childlike faith the profound truth about the will of God. To predict what God's will is going to be, to rationalize about what his will must be, is at once a work of human folly and yet the subtlest of all temptations. The plain and simple truth is that his will is that he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that - not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God's grace, but every day. ~ Father Walter J. Ciszek

Well, she's not responding to my advances," he observed more brightly than he felt, "so she must be dead."
"Or she's a woman of good taste and sense. ~ Cassandra Clare

Responding to myth often means wearing
blinkers. Myth is a complex game of production and reception that involves selecting some parts of a narrative and suppressing others. As we shall see later on, this process of communication is not always easily controlled. ~ Helen Morales

Making something and sending it out into the world and then people not only responding to it but adopting it for their own and making a separate thing for it, that's beautiful. It just shows you how much you can affect other people ... the butterfly effect of everything you put out into the world. ~ Marketa Irglova

You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.
-responding to an idiot in the audience during a stand-up performance who would not stop yelling "I'm Rick James B***h". ~ Dave Chapelle

To be seduced? Why, that was a matter of leaning back in one's chair, sipping one's wine, and responding to a query with the very first thought that has popped into one's head. And ~ Amor Towles

Sometimes I go, "What am I doing with my life?" But then I get letters from young women, or people come up to me, and they say, "You've made such a difference to my confidence." And that is a good thing. I should read more fan mail though. I'm crap at responding. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

Life is responding to you. Life is communicating with you. There are no accidents or coincidences: every single thing has a frequency, and when anything comes into your life, it means it's on the same frequency as you are. ~ Rhonda Byrne

gentleness and passion, and I felt myself responding almost despite ~ James Patterson

While she spent her time in correspondence, Laurin spent her free time with Albert.
Neither Laurin nor Albert, or anyone else inside the keep for that matter , could quite understand the appeal that Josephine and Graeme found in writing.
"Do ye plan on marryin ' the man through letters?" Laurin asked when she had returned from the evening meal. "Mayhap ye want to marry him by proxy."
Josephine simply shook her head and smiled as she went back to writing yet another letter to Graeme.
"How will ye consummate yer marriage?" Laurin asked. "Will ye do that by proxy as well?"
Josephine's face burned a brilliant shade of red as she looked away. She was at that moment responding to a question Graeme had posed on that very topic.
Laurin shook her head and threw up her hands in defeat . "I am goin' to bed."
Josephine returned to her letter. ~ Suzan Tisdale

Our capacity for arbitrary relational responding means that functions acquired through operant and/or respondent conditioning can change through relational framing. Something that up till now was neutral for an individual can, through relational responding, suddenly acquire a reinforcing function, or something reinforcing can acquire aversive functions. ~ Jonas Ramnero

grief. We do and say strange things - sometimes bizarre things - when we are swallowed up in grief. No one should be hard on us when we say thoughtless and selfish things when we are in grief. Both Mary and Martha accused Jesus of being the cause of their brother's death by not responding immediately to their request: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21, 32). Jesus did not rebuke either of them. Instead, He wept with them (see John 11:35). So with all of us. He knows our frame; He remembers we are dust. ~ R.T. Kendall

He kept asking me what was wrong that night and I kept responding, "Nothing."

But it's all the nothings that silently strangle us and our relationships, isn't it? ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness. ~ Jean Cocteau

The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it. ~ Bruno Bettelheim

People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves. ~ Joan Larkin

Responding to the 'great good' within us causes us to be 'great people. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well. ~ Alec Wilkinson