View From Above Quotes

The view from above is always beautiful. Strive to go there, but never forget to be kind. ~ Debasish Mridha

As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor. ~ Barry Commoner

We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there. ~ Mordecai Richler

In order to trust God, we must always view our adverse circumstances through the eyes of faith, not of sense. And just as the faith of salvation comes through hearing the message of the gospel (Romans 10:17), so the faith to trust God in adversity comes through the Word of God alone. It is only in the Scriptures that we find an adequate view of God's relationship to and involvement in our painful circumstances. It is only from the Scriptures, applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, that we receive the grace to trust God in adversity. ~ Jerry Bridges

Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life. ~ Samuel Johnson

People live their lives now in fear of the afterlife, and in the process, they forget that they are still alive! And for as long as you are alive, my friend, you have the chance to break free from any bondages whatsoever, that your fellow man has put you in. Your passion should not come from any one religion; your passion should come and should be fueled by, the fact that you are human and that you have been given this life to leave your stamp of beauty and of progress upon mankind! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Constructive Alternativism: the idea that, while there is only one true reality, reality is always experienced from one or another perspective.

What was realised by Kelly was that every individual acts, reacts and behaves according to how they view their own reality. Each person views another or an event in an entirely different way to anyone else. But what forms that basic reality was of course needed to be understood. ~ Kendra Pinder

[Fall, 1951]

To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor's hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances. ~ Anais Nin

Today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances
that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion. ~ Albert Camus

Unless, of course, he fears I may corrupt Aubrey. Evil communications, you know!'

'I shouldn't think you could,' she said, dispassionately considering the matter. She saw his lips quiver, and her own gravity vanished. 'Oh I don't mean that you would make the attempt! You know very well I don't! The thing is that even if you were to hold an *orgy* here the chances are he would only think it pretty tame, compared with the Romans, not to mention the Bacchae, who, from anything I discover, were precisely the sort of females one would wish a boy *not* to know about!'

This view of the matter was almost too much for his self-control; it was a moment before he could command his voice enough to say: 'I promise you I won't hold any orgies which Aubrey is under my roof!'

'Oh, no, I know you would not! Though I must say,' she added, a gleam of un in her eyes, 'it would be worth it, only to see Nurse's face!'

He laughed out at that, flinging back his head in whole-hearted enjoyment, gasping: 'Why, oh *why* did I never know you until now? ~ Georgette Heyer

Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence. ~ David Graeber

Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany – "Fay ce que vouldras!… fay ce que vouldras!"; Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy! ~ Henry Miller

My role is insignificant. Sure, there's diaper detail and fire watch and general fawning, but aside from keeping our noses above the poverty line, I'm as useful to the kid as a philosophy degree. ~ Gordon Highland

Mary properly bore the name of Virgin, and possessed to the full all the attributes of purity. She was a virgin in both body and soul, and kept all the powers of her soul and her bodily senses far above any defilement. This she did authoritatively, steadfastly, decisively and altogether inviolably at all times, as a closed gate preserves the treasure within, and a sealed book keeps hidden from sight what is written inside. The Scriptures say of her, 'This is the sealed book' (cf. Rev. 5:1-6:1; Dan. 12:4) and 'this gate shall be shut, and no man shall enter by it' (Ezek. 44:2). ~ Gregory Palamas

Whether through grains, beans, or even fruit, there's plenty of protein in a plant-strong diet. We only need 5-8% of our calories from protein, and since protein is the one macronutrient that we can't store, when you get above 15% it either stores as fat or we excrete it. ~ Rip Esselstyn

Come on." I scuttled down the alley, light on my feet, and once I was out of view of the street, I conjured an orb of light. I held up my palm and spread the fragments of light from the glowing ball to give us a better look at the dark alley. It looked more or less the same as it had that morning when I'd appeared on the other side of the dumpster. With my free hand I ran my fingers ~ Danielle Garrett

I started writing a novel from the monster's point of view. It has its own difficulties but, I'm ashamed to say, it's much easier writing from a psychopath's point of view than from that of their empathetic opposite. ~ Justine Larbalestier

The objection that the doctrine of Jesus is excellent but impracticable, comes not only from believers, but from sceptics, from those who do not believe, or think that they do not believe, in the dogmas of the fall of man and the redemption; from men of science and philosophers who consider themselves free from all prejudice. They believe, or imagine that they believe, in nothing, and so consider themselves as above such a superstition as the dogma of the fall and the redemption. ~ Leo Tolstoy

You shoved another one away, didn't you?"
"Yeah," she whispered and fiddled with the cup.
"Then fix it." Funny how easy she made it seem.
"Can't. It was the right thing to do." Sunny parked the car and took the empty mug from Lauren's hand.
"I got a view of his naked ass. It was definitely not the right thing to do. ~ Kishan Paul

MARCELLUS: But look, Agathon, what strange dark light is glowing amongst the clouds. You would think a sea of flame is blazing behind the clouds. A divine fire! And the sky is like a blue bell. It's as if one can hear it tolling in deep, solemn tones. You might even suspect that up there above us, in unattainable heights, something is taking place of which we shall never know. But at times we can sense it, when that vast silence has settled over the earth. And yet! All this is very confusing. The gods have to pose insoluble riddles for us humans. And the earth does not rescue us from the cunning of the gods; for it too is full of things that confound the senses. Both things and humans confuse me. True enough! Things are very taciturn! And the human soul won't yield up its riddles. You ask and it keeps silent.

AGATHON: Let's live and not ask questions. Life is full of beauty. ~ Georg Trakl

We [film supervisors] always try to encourage discussion in the room because a lot of times newer animators who are just out of school or people come from other studios, they're gonna have different points of view and we want to make sure we're vetting all the ideas to get the best ones. A lot of people are shy about speaking up if this is their first time at Pixar or if they don't have a lot of experience, so we try to encourage that. ~ Victor Navone

I see you've decided to take my advice after all, Richard." Lady Wendall's amused voice said from somewhere above and behind him. "Marrying your ward is *exactly* the sort of usual scandal I had in mind: I wonder it didn't occur to me before. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

With my veil I put my faith on display - rather than my beauty. My value as a human is defined by my relationship with God, not by my looks. I cover the irrelevant. And when you look at me, you don't see a body. You view me only for what I am: a servant of my Creator.
You see, as a Muslim woman, I've been liberated from a silent kind of bondage. I don't answer to the slaves of God on earth. I answer to their King. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

She blinks furiously, trying to dredge up some more moisture from her now dry-baked tear ducts. Two of the shapes resolve. One is Selkirk, on her side on the floor of the lab, her legs jackknifing in furious staccato. The other is a hungry which is kneeling astride her, stuffing her spilled intestines into its mouth in pink, sagging coils. More hungries surge in from all sides, hiding Selkirk from view. She's a honey-pot for putrescent bees. The last Justineau sees of her is her inconsolable face. Melanie! ~ M.R. Carey

I think as feminists we have a way of looking at problems that other people appear not to understand. To name names, the right and the
left appear not to understand what it is that feminists are trying to do. Feminists are trying to destroy a sex hierarchy, a race hierarchy, an
economic hierarchy, in which women are hurt, are disempowered, and in which society celebrates cruelty over us and refuses us the integrity of our own bodies and the dignity of our own lives.

... So feminists look at the society we live in and try to understand how we are going to fight male power. And in order to try to figure out
how we're going to fight it, we have to figure out how it's organized, how it works. How does it survive? How does it work itself out? How
does it maintain itself as a system of power?

... So feminists come along, and we say: Well, we are going to understand how it is that these people do what they do. We are going to
approach the problem politically. That means that we are going to try to isolate and describe systems of exploitation as they work on us, from our point of view as the people who are being hurt by them. It means that even though we're on the bottom and they're on the top, we are examining them for points of vulnerability. And as we find those points of vulnerability - and you might locate them anatomically, as well as any other way - we are going to move whatever muscles we have, from whatever positions we are in, ~ Andrea Dworkin

[God] is perfect not only insofar as He is absolute perfection, defining perfection in Himself and from His singular existence and total perfection, but also because He is far beyond being so. He sets a boundary to the boundless and in His total unity He rises above all limitation. He is neither contained nor comprehended by anything. He reaches out to everything and beyond everything and does so with unfailing generosity and unstinted activity. ~ Pope Dionysius

Hold still baby girl. Hold still. I need you to do something for me," he said quietly.

I opened my mouth and said, "What?" but no words came out. I tried again.

Nothing.

He smiled.

He continued to lick my hip bone. He kissed it and looked me in the eyes.

"You listening?" he asked.

As I squeezing the countertop with each hand, my arms beside my body, my hands beside my butt, I nodded.

"Fuck my tongue. I want you to fuck my mouth, do you hear me?"

I opened my mouth and squeaked. My eyes closed. I felt his tongue move from my hip to my clit. His palm slid slowly across my hip, and rested in the depression between my hip and my pussy. His thumb was positioned on the skin above my clit, and pushed upward, exposing my clit totally. As his tongue met my clit, I squirmed.

I felt his lip on top of my clit, and his tongue on the bottom. He started a motion with his tongue and lip, with my clit in between. About three seconds into it, I was done…almost to climax. I felt myself begin to cum. No, not yet, not yet, please…make this last.

He lifted his head, and looked me in the eye. He must have sensed I was going to cum.

"No, don't stop. Please, Erik, don't fucking stop." I begged.

"Fuck my mouth. Grind your pussy on my face baby girl, do you hear me?"

"Yes sir. Do it. Do that again. Exactly what you were doing, exactly," I said, hoping he co ~ Scott Hildreth

It's not simply that communists are atheists and want to stamp out religion; it's that they cannot tolerate anyone who worships a King who stands above the kings of this world. For that higher allegiance gives a basis for demanding freedom and rights from the earthly king.49 ~ Charles W. Colson

The struggle of the mind to keep itself free from every sort of
bondage
to remain curious, open, unsatiated in all its
relations with nature
is tenfold more difficult than the
cultivation of a stable, satisfying point of view, but a
thousandfold more precious. ~ Gardner Murphy

Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the backside of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what's coming to us, each day we're being paid pack for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration - we are owed, goddammit - and so we are expecting everything, everything. ~ Dave Eggers

It is recognised now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: 'the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment'. Analysts who have freed themselves from Freud's bias and joined other behavioural scientists in studying the human need, and that interference with it, in any dimension, is the source of psychic trouble. The sexual is only one dimension of the human potential. Freud saw women only in terms of their sexual relationship with men. But in all those women in whom he saw sexual problems, there must have been very severe problems of blocked growth, growth short of full human identity -- an immature, incomplete self. Society as it was then, by explicit denial of education and independence, prevented women from realising their full potential, or from attaining those interests and ideals that might stimulated their growth. Freud reported these deficiencies, but could only explain them as the toll of 'penis envy'. He saw that women who secretly hungered to be man's equal would not enjoy being his object; and in this, he seemed to be describing a fact. But when he dismissed woman's yearning for equality as 'penis envy', was he not merely stating his own view that woman could never really be man's equal, any more than she could wear his penis? ~ Betty Friedan

Maybe I'd lost something. Maybe I'd lost a lot - more, even, than I could suffer - but I still had my own self. And lonesome as I might be, wasn't no force on Earth or from above what could make me less. ~ J.D. Jordan

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul. ~ E. M. Forster

Monet Refuses the Operation"

Doctor, you say that there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weig ~ Lisel Mueller

One can say that in the last decades chess has become more of a sport than of a science. I see it from an artistic point of view. ~ Judit Polgar

Excerpted From Chapter 18
The most famous sign in the world was only a few hundred yards above me, and the sight of it stopped me in my tracks. The light bulbs surrounding the letters must have been controlled by a timer of some kind because they were off now. But what shocked me was the scale. I was used to seeing the sign from a distance. From this perspective there was no sense of the word HOLLYWOODLAND. All I saw were gigantic letters looming dimly above me in the moonlight like ancient monoliths erected in tribute to the gods of some long-extinct tribe.
A primal feeling of foreboding prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I could imagine the traveler of an earlier age coming across Stonehenge in the dark and experiencing a similar sensation. ~ H.P. Oliver