Shape Of Things Quotes

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes 'good' from 'bad' luck. ~ Karen Russell

A man should think when he fishing of all manner and shape of things, flowing as easily through the mind as the light stream among the rocks ~ Roderick Haig-Brown

you put too much faith in the power of the gods, if you think they can give and take away the shape of things ~ Ovid

The artist is a man who finds that the form or shape of things externally corresponds, in some strange way, to the movements of his mental and emotional life. ~ Graham Collier

A sickness ... defines margins, crystallizes the shape of things. ~ Martha Ostenso

The future is the shape of things to come. ~ H.G.Wells

Autumn was his favourite time of year, not simply for its changing colours but for the crispness in the air and the sharpness of the light. As the leaves fell the landscape revealed itself, like a painting being cleaned or a building being renewed. He could see the underlying shape of things. This was what he wanted, he decided: moments of clarity and silence. ~ James Runcie

There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come. ~ Dexter Palmer

There's also something that is often mistaken for enlightenment which is a kind of insanity. Often, people will have some kind of weird experience which is quite abnormal and think, "Oh my God, that's it, I understand everything" because they start seeing things in a very weird way and think that's how enlightened people see things as well. ~ Brad Warner

The man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: Walter Helwich merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull ... ~ C.S. Lewis

How frightful a thing it is for the preacher when he becomes accustomed to his work, when his sense of wonder departs, when he gets used to the unusual, when he loses his solemn fear in the presence of the High and Holy One; when, to put it bluntly, he gets a little bored with God and heavenly things. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

We are to give up all our sins, big or small, for the Father's reward of eternal life. We are to forget self-justifying stories, excuses, rationalizations, defense mechanisms, procrastinations, appearances, personal pride, judgmental thoughts, and doing things our way. We are to separate ourselves from all worldliness and take upon us the image of God in our countenances. ~ Robert C. Gay

This diversity of social and semi-governmental institutions and organizations gives us not merely an insight into the immense complexity of an urban society, but also an inkling of the huge efforts and even violence required if they are to be disciplined, levelled down and made uniform. We come to realize all the things that must be done to ensure that the hundreds of newspapers and magazines follow the same linguistic line, the theatre repertoires are made to conform, and the libraries and bookshops are purged of the works of writers who have not kept up with the times. What must happen to ensure that museums, whose exhibitions and displays necessarily reflect long-term efforts, accept the inevitability of a new line and a new course? And what must be done to ensure that hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren feel ready to accept a new canon ~ Karl Schlogel

It's so weird, not knowing what your life is going to be. I'm being optimistic. And when 'Leverage' comes to an end, I have lots of ideas for other things. You can't really sit and wait for things to come to you. ~ Beth Riesgraf

Prayer is simply coming into the presence of God. Because when you come into the presence of God, even the things you don't have matter a lot less. ~ Harold S. Kushner

I think I'm known as an adventuress. Even generally in life, I have no fear. It's not that I'm not afraid of things, but when I am afraid of something, I don't back away - I approach it and try to understand what makes me afraid. ~ Bai Ling

You cannot make money with a hockey team. You cannot make money with a hotel, either, and you cannot make money with a golf club. I have all three of them. When you have a certain amount of money, you do silly things - because it's pretty to have a golf course and it's interesting to have a hockey team. ~ Hasso Plattner

I edit things down, and I've got a massive dressing room in the country, and so all the things I'm not going to wear but don't want to get rid of go there. And all the stuff I want to get rid of goes to Oxfam. ~ Kate Moss

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer. ~ Paul Samuelson

If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God. ~ Peter Kreeft

I don't believe in God. Not with my mind. Not with my sense. I believe in what you can see and feel and hear and know. But sometimes a mood comes over me when all of life seems mysterious. The seasons. Things that grow. The different ways to be a person. My dreams. ~ Sybil Claiborne

You have moments of clarity, things become clear to you that you didn't understand before. But there's never any making ends meet or finding any time of longstanding peace of mind about something. ~ Bruce Springsteen

It doesn't really exist; it's just basically lots of different stages between the two pieces, and you end up with, like, a third shape that doesn't exist but is suggested to you by the image. ~ Sean Booth

Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this [man's] happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. ~ G.K. Chesterton

All that stuff with the tabloids is a kind of luxury tax I pay for all the good things I do in my life. ~ Ethan Hawke

Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The first is that I firmly believe that much of the quality we call intelligence is quantitative: he who finds the correct solution to a problem has simply tried out more things that he who does not. ~ Luca Turin

Being raised by a narcissist is a special kind of crazy. It is a pure and lasersharp form of psychological and emotional abuse. But even more devastatingly, it is an invisible abuse. Neither the perpetrator nor the victim even knows it‟s happening. The perpetrator, the narcissist, doesn‟t think she‟s abusing anyone because, by definition, she‟s perfect, remember, and perfect people don‟t do imperfect things like abuse people. And the abuse victim, the daughter – this would be you – doesn‟t realise she‟s abused because she believes her mother‟s lies and thinks that everything is her fault, that she is the one who is broken. ~ Danu Morrigan

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book. ~ Isaac Newton

Misty bit her lip - or at least that was what it looked like with the glamour. Kate could only imagine what she was doing with that mouth full of fangs. 'How do I know I can trust him? Or you?'

Kate rose to her feet. 'You don't. You never do, with people. Some things, you have to take on faith.' She turned and headed for the door, then paused and looked back. 'I don't know how much you know about humans. I'm just guessing here, but we probably seem like a bunch of violent, paranoid, back-stabbing monkeys. 'Cause we are. But the thing is … sooner or later, we all find ways to trust each other, even though we might get burned doing it.'

Misty's lip curled into a sneer. 'Because deep down inside, humans are all noble creatures that want to rise above their natures, right?'

'Oh, hell no,' Kate said. 'It's just better than facing the darkness alone.'
Then she turned and walked out, leaving the dumbstruck Misty behind her. ~ Chris Lester

I haven't any sort of plans for the future but I reckon things will work out in some manner. ~ Dashiell Hammett

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot ... for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there. ~ Marshall McLuhan

All the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. "Cataphatic" (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by "apophatic" (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly, but only at best analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things that God is not. ~ David Bentley Hart

Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind. ~ Charlotte M. Mason

Dare to challenge your current view of your world. ~ Nityananda Das

When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and which they think is effected by demons. Nothing is effected by demons, there are no demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast. ~ Hermann Hesse

The advent of civilization--an overly optimistic word--didn't change things as much as one might think, because no matter how large a city or empire became there was always another "them" to go out and kill. And when organized religion really got going... well, there's a fantastic excuse to murder people in bunches. ~ Gene Doucette

Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be ... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly. ~ Wendy Froud

The Prince who establishes himself in a Province whose laws and language differ from those of his own people, ought also to make himself the head and protector of his feebler neighbours, and endeavour to weaken the stronger, and must see that by no accident shall any other stranger as powerful as himself find an entrance there. For it will always happen that some such person will be called in by those of the Province who are discontented either through ambition or fear; as we see of old the Romans brought into Greece by the Aetolians, and in every other country that they entered, invited there by its inhabitants. And the usual course of things is that so soon as a formidable stranger enters a Province, all the weaker powers side with him, moved thereto by the ill-will they bear towards him who has hitherto kept them in subjection. So that in respect of these lesser powers, no trouble is needed to gain them over, for at once, together, and of their own accord, they throw in their lot with the government of the stranger. The new Prince, therefore, has only to see that they do not increase too much in strength, and with his own forces, aided by their good will, can easily subdue any who are powerful, so as to remain supreme in the Province. He who does not manage this matter well, will soon lose whatever he has gained, and while he retains it will find in it endless troubles and annoyances. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Strive to see God in all things without exception. Do not smother yourself ... If you start smothering yourself with a host of cares and longings and wishes ... you will be disabling yourself from serving God with all your heart. ~ Saint Francis De Sales

I really haven't had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I'd rather tell a story about somebody else. ~ Kurt Cobain

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity - but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own? ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

I guess it's going to have to hurt, I guess I'm going to have to cry, And let go of some things I've loved to get to the other side
I guess it's going to break me down, Like fallin when you try to fly,
Sad but sometimes moving on with the rest of your life starts with goodbye ~ Carrie Underwood

But now, we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated - free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down. ~ Fareed Zakaria

We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. ~ Nora Ephron

What I am certain of is that there's something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more. ~ Augusten Burroughs

To overlook the little things in life, is to overlook the biggest part of life itself! ~ Myself

What it would be like to be separated from all these things he did not know, but the more he dwelled on it the more he understood that it was not so much fear of being separated that he felt as sadness at the idea of parting. ~ Anuk Arudpragasam

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine. ~ Michael Crichton