Sense Of Being Quotes

Being a famous actress may give you a sense of being important, but believe me, it's just an illusion. ~ Juliette Binoche

I have always thought that if you can give viewers the sense of being there a story can be very compelling. ~ Chris Hegedus

All this gladness in life, all honest pride in doing my work in the world, all this keen sense of being, I owe to her!" And it doubles the gladness, it makes the pride glow, it sharpens the sense of existence till I hardly know if it is pain or pleasure, to think that I owe it to one - to one whom I love, as I do not believe man ever loved woman before. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves. ~ Harold Bloom

When we drop all of our painful effort to attain something, then suddenly there is spaciousness in our consciousness, a sense of being unobstructed, and we are able to enjoy life as it comes. ~ Anam Thubten

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

Saudade": a yearning for one's childhood, when the days would merge into one another and the passing of time was of no consequence. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture. ~ Nina George

I think I am slowly becoming an anarchist, that this is only another label for my privateness, and I think that you will understand this in the sense of being against collectivity. ~ Karel Capek

In psychologist Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love, he identifies three characteristics: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is defined as physical attraction and sexual connection, intimacy as the sense of being close and bonded, and commitment as the decision to be together exclusively. As a romantic relationship moves through time, one of these three characteristics is carrying the most weight. Accordingly, although romantic love offers both intimacy and passion/sex, commitment is needed to complete the triangle. ~ Susan Shapiro Barash

Failure cannot be erased. It is built in to a life and helps us grow. Failure cannot be erased, but it can be understood.
Most people carry around a load of feeling that they bury or pretend is not there because it is too painful and alarming to cope with or because it involved unbearable guilt. Anger against a parent, for example.
I knew the tide of woe was rising, that woe that seizes me like anger, and is a form of anger, and I didn't know what to do to stop it, so I got up and picked flowers, cooked my dinner, looked at the news, all the same usual routine that can ward off the devils or suddenly clear the air as when a thunderstorm seems to be coming and then dissipates ... .it always happens when there is a galaxy of problems that get knit together into one huge outcry against the sense of being abandoned or orphanhood ... ~ May Sarton

Elizabeth, with sarcasm and a sense of being lost: Oh indeed! Indeed! ~ Arthur Miller

I always had the sense of being in the spotlight, being on stage, being looked at. ~ Vincent Cassel

I, myself, sank into that abysmal pit of feeling utterly worthless, useless and burdensome. Caring for an animal, especially one that's been rescued, can help return people to a sense of being needed and useful. ~ Ken Wahl

To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe - in accord with a complex of
illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception - that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors. ~ Thomas Ligotti

We have a tendency to become detached observers rather than participants. There might also be a sense of disassembling a complex, flowing process to focus on a small part of it. If we expand our focus to include emerging, one of the first changes we may notice is the bodily sense of being in the midst of something, of constant motion, lack of clarity (in the left-hemisphere sense), and unpredictability. ~ Bonnie Badenoch

I think it was a sense of being completely swallowed up by nature that gave the prairie its powerful attraction.There is nothing like it in all of Europe. Even high up on a Swiss glacier one is still conscious of the toy villages below, the carefully groomed landscape of multicolored fields,the faraway ringing of a church bell. It is all very beautiful, but it does not convey the utmost escape. I believe, with the Indians, that a landscape influences and forms the people living on it and that one cannot understand them and make friends with them without also understanding, and making friends with, the earth from which they came. ~ Richard Erdoes

Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

A garden was one of the few thing in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom. ~ Nelson Mandela

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks ~ Erving Goffman

She could have made a much better thing of that, if she had not been afraid of giving herself away. What hampered her was this sense of being in the middle of things, too close to things, pressed upon and bullied by reality. If she could succeed in standing aside from herself she would achieve self-confidence and a better control. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Sovereignty is not to be considered as an attribute of God-in the sense of being a quality which exists in God (such as omnipotence and omniscience)-rather it is the result of His attributes. ~ Iain H. Murray

I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for obtaining their own safety, comfort and sense of being righteous. For those who busy themselves to know the will of God, however, it is still true that "those who want to save their life will lose it" (Mt 16:25). ~ Dallas Willard

Stigma takes many forms, comes from all directions, is sometimes blatantly overt, but can also be remarkably subtle. It is the cruel comment, the unkind smirk, the extrusion from the group, the lost job opportunity, the rejected marriage proposal, the ineligibility for life insurance, the inability to adopt a child or pilot a plane.

But it is also the reduced expectation, the helping hand when none is needed or wanted, the solicitous sympathy that one cannot really be expected to measure up.

And the secondary psychological and practical harms of having a mental disorder come only partly from how others see you. A great deal of the trouble comes from the change in how you see yourself: the sense of being damaged goods, feeling not normal or worthy, not a full fledged member of the group.

It is bad enough that stigma is so often associated with having a mental disorder, but the stigma that comes from being mislabeled with a fake diagnosis is a dead loss with absolutely no redeeming features. ~ Allen Frances

Samadhi is perfect absorption to the point where there is no sense of being absorbed, not the consciousness of knowing that you are having an experience. ~ Frederick Lenz

For Bulgakov, however, the greatest underlying source of unease, amounting at times to despair, was something less tangible though very real to him, since it occurs as an ever-present refrain throughout these stories. This was the sense of being a lone soldier of reason and enlightenment pitted against the vast, dark, ocean-like mass of peasant ignorance and superstition... [in] the fearsome, pre-literate, mediaeval world of the peasantry ~ Michael Glenny

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else. ~ Paul Auster

A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am comfortable calling myself a writer of suspense, or a writer of thrillers; both terms are sort of interchangeable to me. I think that came from a sense of being at conflict with my true nature throughout my youth, and being afraid of discovery, and feeling as if I didn't belong. ~ Christopher Rice

a rule that I had no less devastatingly laid down for myself, and it was this: that I had no right to be happy unless the people I loved - especially my children - were happy too. I have come to believe that is not true. I believe instead that we all of us have not only the right to be happy no matter what but also a kind of sacred commission to be happy - in the sense of being free to breathe and move, in the sense of being able to bless our own lives, even the sad times of our own lives, because through all our times we can learn and grow, and through all our times, if we keep our ears open, God speaks to us his saving word. Then by drawing on all those times we have had, we can sometimes even speak and live a saving word to the saving of others. ~ Frederick Buechner

For a long time the only time I felt beautiful-in the sense of being complete as a woman, as a human being, and even female-was when I was singing. ~ Leontyne Price

She experienced a moment of incandescent wonder, a sense of being connected, not just to these people, but to everyone and everything alive: every beating heart, every fluttering wing, every green shoot thrusting itself up out of the earth, seeking, as she was, the sun. ~ Hillary Jordan

I would then say that there are two kinds of feeling. The first is to feel in the sense of concentrating your emotions on something immediately available for your understanding: you make your understanding out of the emotions you have about it. The second is to feel in the sense of being affected without trying to understand: something is felt, you do not know what, and it is more important to feel it than to try to understand it, since once you try to understand it you no longer feel it. ~ Laura Riding

Yeah, I was born in Montreal and I go back to Vancouver and Toronto a lot, so I have a sense of being Canadian, and I was raised by two Canadians, and my wife is Canadian, so yeah, I feel it. ~ Jason Reitman

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted. Two decades ago now, and yet here, on the No. 168 bus towards Hampstead Heath, Peter was beset with an almost bodily sense of being back there. His lips twitched with the memory of being nine years old and lanky as a foal. His mood lifted as he remembered how large, how filled with possibilities, and yet, at once, how safe and navigable the world had seemed when he was shut within those four walls . ~ Kate Morton

The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity. ~ Aldous Huxley

If I had hoped to skirt the sense of being a stranger in the world by coming to Ghana, then disappointment awaited me. And I had suspected as much before I arrived. Being a stranger concerns not only matters of familiarity, belonging, and exclusion but as well involves a particular relation to the past. If the past is another country, then I am its citizen. I am the relic of an experience most preferred not to remember, as if the sheer will to forget could settle or decide the matter of history. .I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead. ~ Saidiya Hartman

I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad. ~ John Pomfret

At that moment, it just seemed as if his face was perfect. Innocent and strong. And - why not? - exotic, too, bu exotic in the sense of being distinct from most of the other faces we saw every day. A face I would design if I could design a face for the son I was never going to have. It was an Asian face. Not unlike the one I used to see in the mirror so many decades ago, the one I was so ashamed of for its distinctive contours. The one I spent years trying to alter with clothespins and duct tape. ~ Alex Tizon

emergent relatedness assumes that the infant from the moment of birth is deeply social in the sense of being designed to engage in and find uniquely salient interactions with other humans. ~ Daniel N. Stern

Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is kind of a self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes. It's a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I'd just feel numb. ~ Julie Buntin

The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don't. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership. ~ Niall Williams

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of
please forgive me
wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. ~ Anne Lamott

I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally. ~ Wes Craven

The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started. ~ Salman Rushdie

So, along with clear seeing, there's another important element, and that's kindness. It seems that, without clarity and honesty, we don't progress. We just stay stuck in the same vicious cycle. But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking like we've been sucking on lemons. We become so caught up in introspection that we lose any contentment or gratitude we might have had. The sense of being irritated by ourselves and our lives and other people's idiosyncrasies becomes overwhelming. That's why there's so much emphasis on kindness. ~ Pema Chodron

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply. ~ Neil Postman

Happiness is not giddiness or some overly inflated sense of being. ~ Asa Don Brown

Above all, what you have as young people that's vitally needed to make social change, is impatience. You want it to happen now. There have to be enough people that say, "We want it now, in our lifetime. " We want to see apartheid in South Africa come down right now. We want to see the war in Central America stop right now. We want the CIA off our campus right now. We want an end to sexual harassment in our communities right now. Be adventurists in the sense of being bold and daring. Be opportunists and seize this opportunity, this moment in history, to go out and save our country. It's your turn now. ~ Abbie Hoffman

Where does it begin this sense of being the Other? ~ Jon Katz

I'll never lose the sense of being an underdog. ~ Esai Morales

After more darkness and silence, I said, "Well, do you believe in the informed decision?" More darkness and silence. "No!"

I envy his certainty!

He understood that a determined life had its limits. "I had a wonderful life and I had nothing to do with it" - well, now I can say that, too. There is this sense of being on your own path. ~ Wendell Berry

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama - a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience. ~ William Styron

I have no sense of being famous - you're just working. And then you'll have a random day in London when you'll do some press and it creeps into your awareness that this goes out - that what you do every day goes out to televisions right across the country. ~ Karen Gillan

We don't want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn't what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output - each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band. ~ Neil Peart

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress. ~ Wendy McClure

Crime writers adore islands. We love the sense of being trapped within a community apart, where normal codes of behavior, if not ignored, can be allowed to slip. ~ Sharon Bolton

In this country, unfortunately, as all over the world, we care so little, we have no deep feeling about anything. Most of us are intellectual-intellectuals in the superficial sense of being very clever, full of words and theories about what is right and what is wrong, about how we should think, what we should do. Mentally we are highly developed, but inwardly there is very little substance or significance; and it is this inward substance that brings about true action, which is not action according to an idea. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope.

In the following passage, Nabokov helped blur the distinctions which I want to draw:

...'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Orwell blurred the same distinctions when, in one of his rare descents into rant, "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," he wrote exactly the sort of thing Nabokov loathed:

You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take side ~ Richard M. Rorty

Waking up Thursday morning to another dreary day and the sense of being physically stuffed, they focused on FISH. While Charlotte interviewed the postmaster about the origin, techniques, and ingredients for his best-in-Maine lobster bakes, Nicole set off to gather recipes for glazed salmon, baked pesto haddock, and cod crusted with marjoram, a minted savory unique to Quinnipeague, and sage. ~ Barbara Delinsky

The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this. ~ Shusaku Endo

The most terrifying burden of the creature is to be isolated, which is what happens in individuation: one separates himself out of the herd. This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself. These are the risks when the person begins to fashion consciously and critically his own framework of heroic self-reference. Here is precisely the definition of the artist type, or the creative type generally. We have crossed a threshold into a new type of response to man's situation. No one has written about this type of human response more penetratingly than Rank; and of all his books, Art and Artist is the most secure monument to his genius. I ~ Ernest Becker

You've done it in the simulator so many times, you don't have a real sense of being excited when the flight is going on. You're excited before, but as soon as the liftoff occurs, you are busy doing what you have to do. ~ Alan Shepard

A moment of grace. There rose up within me a profound sense of being loved. I felt "gathered together" and encircled by a Presence completely loving, as if I were enveloped by the music of a love song created just for me. It was not overwhelming or even emotional. Just a warm knowing that I was in God's loving embrace ... centered and unified there.
[Love]encounters cannot be analyzed, only shared. If you take a butterfly, Robert Frost said, and pin it down into a box, you no longer have a butterfly. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves. ~ Jess Walter

We should teach our kids that they're blessing and not a burden and that they're valuable beyond what they can imagine - in God's eyes, in the world's eyes - that they're purpose is so important to fulfill and it's gonna make a difference in the world. And they're the only ones that can make the difference that they can make, in the way that they can make it. That's why we all have different fingerprints. And I feel like the message is not clear enough. It's not clear because they go to school and they get challenged and they're bombarded with the idea that abortion is okay, that we can just go ahead and, you know, if we're not ready to have a kid we can just take care of that problem. But kids are not a problem, they're not a mistake, they're not a burden. They're blessing from God and that's what we don't understand. My mom was sixteen when she had me and we both almost died, I was a second kid, she had my brother when she was fifteen. And we both almost died and the doctors told her to abort me and I think that a lot of people gave her that advice. So when I grew up I think I had a sense of being a burden. And I think a lot of kids actually have that sense. ~ Lacey Sturm

I'm unapologetic not because I'm strong-willed or overconfident, I'm unapologetic because this is it; this is my life. There is nothing I can do, no one I can please. I am a person with a strong sense of being, that's all. ~ Jean Seberg

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience. ~ David Levering Lewis

In my heart I like to remain an amateur, in the sense of being in love with what I'm doing, forever astonished again at the endless possibilities of seeing and using the camera as a recording tool. ~ Inge Morath

I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil. ~ Andrew Solomon

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. ~ Richard Preston

That's not what it's all about. In fact, it seems we tend to misun-
derstand the very meaning of the word education.
Education comes from the Latin word educare, which literally
means "led out," in the sense of being drawn forth. I find that little
tidbit really interesting, because we don't generally think of educa-
tion in that sense - of drawing forth something from the learner.
Instead, it's far more common to see education treated as some-
thing that's done to the learner - as something that's poured in,
not drawn out. This model is especially popular in corporate train-
ing, with a technique that's known as sheep dip training. ~ Andy Hunt

Lila sensed the cessation of motion more than she actually felt it. Being in the shuttle did something to her equilibrium - something about the sense of being high in the air in what looked like a bubble from the inside combined with a force that felt like an invisible seat belt. Her fear was making everything worse. ~ Sean Platt

I'm not 17 anymore. I still have some of the same sort of anger, but I have a sense of humor about it ... a sense of being constructive with that anger. ~ Dave Pirner

He was too fascinated with this ghost of Magnus. So many questions came to his mind: "Can you eat, can you drink, can you make love, can you taste?" "No," said Magnus, "but I can see very well, and I can feel hot and cold in a pleasurable way, and I have a sense of being here, being alive, occupying this space, being tangible, and having a tempo in time. ... ~ Anne Rice

To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd

Every experience comes to us in one of four ways: as a feeling, a thought, an action, or simply a sense of being. ~ Deepak Chopra

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business. ~ Anton Chekhov

The intellectual, i n my sense of the word , is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder,but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense , a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas,or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public. This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along. That this involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy, and a complicated struggle to balance the problems of one's own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting effort, constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect. Yet its invigorations and complexities, for me at least, make one the richer for it, even though it doesn't make one particularly popular. ~ Edward W. Said

Many Vietnam veterans I see in the clinic swing painfully between a crushed, tainted mortality and its nostalgically longed-for, but dreaded, godlike opposite. Above all, a sense of merely human virtue, a sense of being valued and of valuing anything, seems to have fled their lives. As products of biblical culture, most veterans believed it is nobler to strive to be like God than to want to be human. However, all of our virtues come from not being gods; generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury; and so on. ~ Jonathan Shay

The wilderness is a place of rest - not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance. ~ David Douglas

The naturalistic hypothesis that it's the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent with what meditation might reveal. Since experience seems a function (somehow – explaining consciousness is just getting underway) of what the brain and body do, the very sense of being a subject which purportedly "has" experience and "to whom" things happen is itself simply another neurally-instantiated aspect of subjectivity, albeit psychologically fundamental. What the brain constructs can perhaps be temporarily deconstructed, given the right conditions and sufficient practice. Thus the first-person meditative experience of the dropping away of ego, should it occur, is to experience what third-person science shows to be the dependent arising, and non-arising, of the phenomenal self. In this way, the scientific-physicalist and meditative-experiential perspectives, both empirical in different senses, end up with the same conclusion: the very core of self – the experienced locus of all our concern and striving – is a mutable, perishable, dependent phenomenon, just as the Buddha taught. Seeing this clearly from both perspectives might give us some psychological distance from the very self on behalf of which we're striving, giving us a measure of equanimity and opening space for compassion centered on others. Science and Buddhist practice are thus consilient partners in the quest for liberation. ~ Thomas W. Clark

Two's company and three's a crowd, but seven can be an uprising. And the seven can become 70 or 700 or 7000 very quickly if the sense of being wronged is felt broadly and truly enough. ~ Michael Leunig

I think I also don't confess because I am still so unbelieving of what happened. I am still aghast. I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone to someone else. So I am evasive in order to spare myself ... I can see though that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it. ~ Sonali Deraniyagala

One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It's the same thing: a child asks, "What's going to happen next?" When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it's not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it. ~ Ayad Akhtar

The coma carried me into a world where time and space seemed to vanish; it was a dreamlike existence in which people, places, and situations shifted as quickly as thoughts. I had a profound sense of being at a crossroads, a turning point, somewhere between death and life ... ~ Hal Zina Bennett

If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged. ~ William James

If AIBO is in some sense a toy, it is a toy that changes minds. It does this in several ways. It heightens our sense of being close to developing a postbiological life and not just in theory or in the laboratory. And it suggests how this passage will take place. It will begin with our seeing the new life as "as if " life and then deciding that "as if " may be life enough. Even now, as we contemplate "creatures" with artificial feelings and intelligence, we come to reflect differently on our own. The question here is not whether machines can be made to think like people but whether people have always thought like machines. ~ Sherry Turkle

The thoughts that creep into our brain about other people tell us less about those people than they do about ourself ... Understand that most judgments of others are an attempt to empower ourselves and give a sense of being better than the person we judge ... Our primitive nature (automatic brain) helps us believe that this is necessary for protection. Following this natural tendency puts up further obstructions to the law of attraction. ~ Charles F. Glassman

I used to be very afraid of graveyards and death and such things, but not anymore. There is just no sense of being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth. ~ NoViolet Bulawayo

Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at. ~ Rupert Sheldrake

Survival requires a dose of madness - what cynics call "hoping against hope" - just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. "Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us," observed one Holocaust expert. "Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst. ~ Mark Matousek

African American racial consciousness responds to the horrors of the Middle Passage and New World slavery as well as to the unfulfilled promise of "all men are created equal." Blackness becomes a form of "double consciousness," as W. E. B. Du Bois put it long ago, a sense of being both African and American, insiders and outsiders, different and equal.
In ~ Bruce Dain

People can get blinded by a sense of being comfortable or feeling secure, but that's quite a cynical point of view. ~ Joshua James Alphonse Franceschi

For all his frustrations and his chronic sense of being overburdened. He was proud of that; he'd always felt that it was worth doing a task properly if it was worth doing at all. That was part of his problem, of course; that was why he ended up with so much to do. It was also the source of his own particular pride: he knew
and he was certain they knew that there was no one else who could handle details such as these as well as he. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

Not until he stood at the altar did he achieve a sense of being hale and furnished. It was strange, he thought, that a man would find his surest current in the spot where he felt least worthy. ~ Charles Tennyson Turner

The heartfelt realization of one's insignificance yields a calming sense of being completely connected to the greater whole. As a tiny part of the world and humanity, I now feel more at peace and much larger than I ever felt as a man alone. ~ Steven Callahan

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider. ~ Larry McMurtry

Our kids need us to be the dad, not a fun single uncle. When you can replace your 007 poster with a framed portrait of Grandma, your kids will experience an underlying sense of being at home when they are with you - whether for a weekend, a summer, or full-time. ~ Tez Brooks

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. ~ Brian Cox