Synopsis Example Quotes

The greatest reward for your actions is not the respect you gain from others but the respect you gain for yourself. ~ T Jay Taylor

Fear of the Dark I've always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I'd picture something terrible happening; I'd picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that "my too good to be true" was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I'm crazy and now they're all sitting there like, "She's a nut. How do we get out of here?" Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, "Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?" The auditorium erupted in some kind ~ Brene Brown

I knew that I wanted to follow their example and become a teacher who would help students become self-directed learners. ~ Bell Hooks

Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik. ~ Vaclav Klaus

The international community of scientists may help to abolish war by setting an example to the world of practical cooperation extending across barriers of nationality, language, and culture. ~ Freeman Dyson

The violence in the Executioner books is merely stage-dressing for dramatizing the commitment and dedication Bolan has to his ideals and the lengths to which he will go to honor them. We can learn this message of love and commitment and carry it into our own lives without the violence and bloodshed, and of course it is this wish that fuels the writing. I do not want my readers to pick up a gun and follow Bolan's example; I want them to be stirred by his commitment and to find ways to meet the same challenges without resort to violent means. ~ Don Pendleton

I like meeting all my fans and signing autographs, although it can all get a bit crazy. Yesterday, for example, a boy just came over and planted a big kiss on my face! I was like, 'Hello?' ~ Britney Spears

this approach was permissive only in the sense that all feelings were permitted. For example, "I can see that you're having fun making designs in the butter with your fork." But that doesn't mean that you have to permit a child to behave in a way that's unacceptable to you. As you remove the butter, you can also let the young "artist" know that "Butter is not for playing with. If you want to make designs, you can use your clay. ~ Adele Faber

Love's only power is the power of example. ~ Marty Rubin

The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture. ~ Hod Lipson

Because that's what intimacy is: It's a willingness to be vulnerable, a willingness to bite my tongue and a willingness to set an example of what I believe in. ~ Diane Lane

All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from beign the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated. ~ Rebecca Solnit

There is data [on race and intelligence]. My claim is that it doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't enough work; there aren't enough people who have done the work – and the definition...I mean, trust me: "heritable" is a serious problem.

Because...for example, let's say that there was a belief that people who had a brow ridge, or something, were stupid. And that belief was widespread. And that brow ridge was genetically encoded, and it resulted in people going into the world and facing discrimination in school, let's say, because the brow ridge connoted to the teachers that they were not likely to be intelligent, and therefore they were given simpler lessons; they got dumbtracked or something like that.

That would show up as a genetically heritable difference in intelligence between brow-ridged people and non-brow-ridged people. That does not mean that it was encoded in the genome and that it was the brain that was blueprinted...what it means is that some feature that was encoded in the genome caused the environment to interact with the individual in a way that then produced a difference in intellect.

[...] It is so early in the study of this stuff, we really don't know. And the taboo nature of those questions is causing a vacuum that is being filled with an artificially pure (and probably not correct) perspective. ~ Bret Weinstein

It's amazing. It's actually build from old Siemens Telefunken transistors from the 60ties. There is like 10 in there. It's the most powerful distortion you can have. It does not only do distortion, it does so many weird things. You can't control it, it's sound different all the time. But it's an endless source for fantastic sounds. For example the track "Transit" is entirely made with this box. You have to put the guitar sound in. It's like a pedal. ~ Christian Fennesz

Do you know, it's really hard to be a parent. I blame it on Santa Claus. You spend so long making sure your kid doesn't know he's fake that you can't tell when you're supposed to stop."
"Mom, I found you and Calla wrapping my presents when I was, like, six."
"It was a metaphor, Blue."
"A metaphor's supposed to clarify by providing an example. That didn't clarify."
"Do you know what I mean or not?"
"What you mean is that you're sorry you didn't tell me about Butternut."
Maura glowered at the door as if Calla stood behind it. "I wish you wouldn't call him that."
"If you'd been the one to tell me about him, then I wouldn't be using what Calla told me."
"Fair enough. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The fact that Ferdinand and Isabella did not choose the path of tolerance is seen as an example of the intractability and inevitability of intolerance, especially in the premodern era. But their actions may be far better understood as the failure to make the more difficult decision, to have the courage to cultivate a society that can live with its own flagrant contradictions. They chose instead to go down the modern path, the one defined by an ethic of unity and harmony, and which is largely intolerant of contradiction. ~ María Rosa Menocal

We know where a song's popularity starts, and we can watch it spread," Titus told me. Take, for example, Lorde, the out-of-nowhere sensation of 2013. Shazam's engineers can rewind time to trace the international contagion of her first single, "Royals, ~ Anonymous

The earliest example known to me of replaced body parts is exemplified by a Mayan skull dating back to 1400 BC. In this skull, false teeth made of stone had been implanted. ~ John Gurdon

There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists ... Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness.. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest. ~ Michio Kaku

The symptoms of loving and hating someone are the same too. For example, the stomach twists at the thought of them. The heart beats faster at the thought of them. They make you lose sleep and appetite at the thought of them. And during every interaction with them, you lose control of your mind and body. You'd be so consumed by them that you cannot think of anything but them. ~ M.V. Kasi

For example, a breakthrough in better batteries could supplant hydrogen. Better solar cells could replace or win out in this race to the fuel of the future. Those, I see, as the three big competitors: hydrogen, solar cells and then better batteries. ~ Bob Inglis

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. ~ Alan Kay

That this blind and aging man forged ahead with such gusto is a remarkable lesson, a tale for the ages. Euler's courage, determination, and utter unwillingness to be beaten serves, in the truest sense of the word, as an inspiration for mathematician and non-mathematician alike. The long history of mathematics provides no finer example of the triumph of the human spirit. ~ William Dunham

A horse perceives eye contact as provocative, as if it and its status in the herd are not being respected. If it cannot avoid eye contact, it will react in a different way, by rebelling for example. In dressage you don't get anywhere by not showing respect, however superior your species might be. Any animal trainer can tell you that. In the mountains in Argentina there's a wild horse which will jump off the nearest precipice if any human tries to ride it. ~ Jo Nesbo

A mother's example sketches the outline of her child's character. ~ Tim Howard

Change is the nature of nature,'" she read. "'For example, stars expand as they grow older. They grow from a star, to a red super-giant, to a supernova. When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion dispenses different elements-helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel-across the universe, scattering starduest. That stardust now makes up the planets, including ours. ~ Michelle Cuevas

It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.
This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. ~ Milan Kundera

Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves make very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That's what makes it so compelling and - to be frank - terrifying. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I often wonder why the West is much more interested in aid deliveries than in fair trade, for example. The fair exchange of goods would place far more money into the hands of the affected people than relief operations. ~ Paul Kagame

When it comes to sticking to your resolutions, research has shown that 'action-oriented' resolutions have a better chance of being upheld than 'idea-oriented.' For example, a resolution to lose weight is really only an idea with nothing actionable to do. However, sticking with that goal in mind, you could make the resolution action-oriented by saying 'get up 30 minutes earlier every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and do a 20-minute workout at home before work.' Now you have an actionable path on how to achieve your goal. ~ Brett Hoebel

Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings? ~ Gene Logsdon

DON Luigi Giussani used to quote this example from Bruce Marshall's novel To Every Man a Penny. The protagonist of the novel, the abbot Father Gaston, needs to hear the confession of a young German soldier whom the French partisans are about to sentence to death. The soldier confesses his love of women and the numerous amorous adventures he has had. The young priest explains that he has to repent to obtain forgiveness and absolution. The soldier answers, "How can I repent? It was something that I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?" Father Gaston, who wants to absolve the man who has been marked by destiny and who's about to die, has a stroke of inspiration and asks, "But are you sorry that you are not sorry?" The young man answers impulsively, "Yes, I am sorry that I am not sorry." In other words, he apologizes for not repenting. The door was opened just a crack, allowing absolution to come in ... . ~ Pope Francis

I was very fortunate to have some great mentors. A father that was always in my life set the example every day at home. Everybody asks me, 'What was your role model?' My role model slept 20 feet from me every night. I could always go talk to him and ask him questions no matter what it was about. ~ Larry Fitzgerald