The Life Shoppe Quotes

What trumps the 'How' of Leadership is the 'Why ~ Todd Stocker

Nothing is given to man on earth - struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible - the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen. ~ Andrew Bernstein

I am not going to put the blame on you. But… guess what? I am still here. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses - the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle. ~ Kate Atkinson

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go. ~ Joan Didion

The groups of muscles that have become virtually unnecessary in modern life, though still a vital element of a man's body, are obviously pointless from a practical point of view, and bulging muscles are as unnecessary as a classical education is to the majority of practical men. Muscles have gradually become something akin to classical Greek. To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential. ~ Yukio Mishima

Men are accustomed to making objective assessments of devastating situations, as long as they are not immersed in them. Rare is he who maintains objectivity in the midst of personal affliction. ~ Michael D. O'Brien

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it. ~ Richard Powers

I'm often called in as a coach and speaker to motivate staff, teams, the public and leaders. The key to this is simple; you cannot truly, deeply and sustainably motivate anybody until you know what their motives are...what motivates them...? ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Realize that life is more than meets the eye. Life goes beyond our five senses. Be receptive to new knowledge and to new experiences. ~ Brian L. Weiss

I think one of the best gifts you could offer me, as a writer, is to engage with my words, to tell me how they felt to you. To let me, for a moment, see my words through your eyes. And it feels like you read my words so carefully, that you were gentle with them, nurturing. I feel loved and seen by the way you responded. Thank you for caring for the words that rise from my soul. ~ Ashley Asti

Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and entered nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don't know about? What exactly is the story here? ~ David Foster Wallace

[W]hoever leads an auspicious life here and governs the commonwealth rightly, as my most noble father did, who promoted all piety and banished all ignorance, has a most certain way to heaven. ~ Henry VIII Of England

God has so ordained and governed the Christian church that the cross has been the preparation for victory, and death the way to life. Such ~ John Calvin

Ruth's days off always oppress her. The realm of choice paralyzes her. To sleep is to choose neither life nor death. ~ Kate Zambreno

The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I never talk about my private life. When you're in this business it becomes so precious. I don't understand when people open up about themselves to the press. ~ Chris Noth

When I think back on the twenty years I spent in school, what sticks with me isn't any particular subject, learning tool, or classroom. It is the teachers who brought my education to life and drove my interest forward, so that my passion for learning continued, despite the long days, the hard chairs, the difficult problems. These women and men were giants. They were underpaid, and they put up with all sorts of crap, but they made me the person I am today vastly more than the facts they taught. That relationship is what digital education technology cannot ever replicate or replace, and why a great teacher will always provide a more innovative model for the future of education than the most sophisticated device, software, or platform. ~ David Sax

She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn't hurting anyone. ~ Seanan McGuire

I just think I'm blessed. I love the Lord Jesus Christ. I have a great grandmother that passed away at 104 and two grandparents that passed away at 97 and 95, and they never worried about protein. They just enjoyed life, and that's what I'm doing. ~ Herschel Walker

Christianity . . . does not [simply] stand in the history that we only know and which knowledge we take to ourselves so that we say "Christ died for us and has broken death in us and made it into life. He has paid the debt for us. We need only to comfort ourselves with this and firmly believe that it has happened."

Since we in ourselves find that sin in the flesh is living, desirous and active, that it might work, the new birth out of Christ must be something else that does not work along with the sinful flesh and that does not will sin. . . .

Here a Christian is to consider why he calls himself a Christian and is truly to consider whether he is one. Because I may learn to know and understand that I am a sinner, and that Christ has killed my sins on the cross and shed His blood for me, this in no way makes a Christian out of me. The inheritance is only for the children. A maid in the house knows well what the wife would eagerly have. This does not therefore make her an inheritor of the wife's goods. The devil also knows that there is a God [James 2:19]. That does not therefore make him an angel again. However, if the maid in the household marries the wife's son, then she can truly come to the inheritance of the wife's goods. . . .

The scorner and the titular Christian is the whore's son, who must be cast out for he is not to inherit Christ's inheritance in the kingdom of God (Galatians 4:30). He is no use, and only Babel, a confusion of the on ~ Jakob Bohme

In coming to Christ we don't bring our old life up to a higher plane; we leave it at the cross. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

This is our time: our time to dream, our time to love, our time to live. Look around and see the beauty of today. This time will never come again, let's enjoy it. ~ Avina Celeste

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond. ~ Hypatia

"President Monson, I may never see the Prophet. I may never hear the Prophet. But President, far better, now that I am a member of this Church, I can obey the Prophet." ~ Thomas S. Monson

Those of us who oppose censorship believe that reading about something is a safe way to explore and understand it, and that it is the best way to prepare young people to deal with the issues they will face, both in school and later in life. It's true that some material is "offensive"--but to know how to respond to it, we need to understand it. ~ Joan Bertin

Life is too short to waste any amount of time on wondering what other people think about you. In the first place, if they had better things going on in their lives, they wouldn't have the time to sit around and talk about you. What's important to me is not others' opinions of me, but what's important to me is my opinion of myself. ~ C. JoyBell C.

My Home

My home is always there,in the heaven's vault,
Where one just hears lyre's sounds,
All with a spark of life have here their resort,
A bard has, too, a space around.

It gets the farthest stars by edges of his roof,
And from a wall to one another
There is a path whose measure can be proved
Not by a look, but by a soul, rather.

A sense of basic truth in every soul nests -
The seed that's sacred and eternal:
In flesh of time it always can embrace
Space, endless, and the century's kernel.


And mighty God has built for this exclusive sense
My home of the light and wonders,
And only here I'm doomed to sufferings at length,
And only here - to calmness. ~ Mikhail Lermontov

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Some people think that going to church on Sunday and owning a dust-covered Bible makes a person a Christian. That is not true. A Christian is one in whom Christ dwells, and the person's life will give evidence of this. ~ Billy Graham

Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength, up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears. Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show, nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry. Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you give away to sorrow. All your life is up-and-down like this. ~ Archilochos

I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind. ~ Gregory Maguire

Before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. ~ Neil Gaiman

Not everyone wins the lottery,
but everyone who does
bought a ticket.

To live the life you want,
you have to be brave
and buy the ticket every single day. ~ Iain S. Thomas

I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world
constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

If you are harboring the slightest bitterness toward anyone, or any unkind thoughts of any sort whatever, you must get rid of them quickly. They are not hurting anyone but you. It isn't enough just to do right things and say right things - you must also think right things before your life can come into harmony. ~ Peace Pilgrim

Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate. ~ Albert Einstein

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. ~ Joan Didion

He kissed her soundly, stealing her breath, before saying, "Tell me what you want, my lovely."
"I-" She stopped, too many words coming at once. 'I want you to touch me. I want you to love me. I want you to show me the life that I have been missing.' She shook her head, uncertain.
He smiled, pressing firmly with his hand against her, watching the wave of pleasure course through her. "Incredible," he whispered against the side of her neck. "So responsive. Go on..."
"I want-" She sighed as he set his lips to the hardened peak of one breast again. "I want... I want you," she said, and, in that moment, the words, so utterly simple in the face of the roiling emotions that coursed through her, seemed enough.
He moved his fingers firmly, deftly against her, and she gasped. "Do you want me here, Empress?"
She closed her eyes in embarrassment, biting her lower lip.
"Are you aching for me here?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"Poor, sweet love. ~ Sarah MacLean

It's not life, it's just an existence, jumping from one moment to the next with no idea of the past, and no plan for the future. ~ S.J. Watson

The arts are what makes life worth living. You've got food, you've got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you laugh, make you cry, make you connect - make you love are communicated through the arts. They aren't extras. ~ Barack Obama

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror. ~ Sigmund Freud

So far as we yet know, this is the only planet in the entire universe which has summoned forth life in all its brilliance and variety. To knowingly cut this flowering short is undoubtedly a crime, one more unspeakable even than the cruellest genocide or most destructive war. If each person is uniquely valuable, each species is surely more so. I can see no excuses for collaborating in such a crime. As the post-war Nuremberg trials established, ignorance is no defence; nor is merely following orders. To me the moral path lies not in passively accepting our destructive role, but in actively resisting such a horrendous fate. As ~ Mark Lynas

Grief is times bailiff sent to evict you from your old life. Its black warrant demands of you hard labour. There can be no escape of reprieve. You must toil laying down the foundation stones of acceptance, stone by stone, until you have paved your way to your new life. ~ Kerry Cue

What we call life is only talk of nature. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of "No worries, mate," while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point. ~ Pico Iyer

Dear empath:

You are a being of immense depth, wisdom, and compassion. You are a pioneer and trailblazer of humanity, a model for others on how to be sensitive and powerful. All the strength and love you need is already within you, waiting to be discovered. ~ Mateo Sol