Vision Of Life Quotes

I was darker than he was. And I'm not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. "That's why you like Spider-Man. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. ~ Orison Swett Marden

This example, it seems to us, suffices to show in what way the nonreligious man of modern societies is still nourished and aided by the activity of his unconscious, yet without thereby attaining to a properly religious experience and vision of the world. The unconscious offers him solutions for the difficulties of his own life, and in this way plays the role of religion, for, before making an existence a creator of values, religion ensures its integrity, From one point of view it could almost be said that in the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious - which means too that in such men the possibility of reintegrating a religious vision of life lies at a great depth. Or, from the Christian point of view, it could also be said that nonreligion is equivalent to a new "fall" of man - in other words, that nonreligious man has lost the capacity to live religion consciously, and hence to understand and assume it; but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as, after the first "fall," his ancestor, the primordial man, retained intelligence enough to enable him to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world. After the first "fall," the religious sense descended to the level of the ' 'divided" consciousness"; now, after the second, it has fallen even further, into the depths of the unconscious; it has been "forgotten," Here the considerations of the hi ~ Mircea Eliade

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms. ~ Mirra Ginsburg

Nothing stops an organization faster than people who believe that the way you worked yesterday is the best way to work tomorrow. ~ Jon C. Madonna

To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership-not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere. ~ Ronald Reagan

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs. ~ Alfred Stieglitz

I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life. ~ Jim Woodring

It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Having a vision for your life allows you to live out of hope, rather than out of your fears. ~ Stedman Graham

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse. ~ Benjamin Franklin

This vision of life is deeply centered in God, the sacred. So it was for Jesus. So it is in all of the enduring religions of the world. What makes Christianity Christian is centering in God as known in Jesus. ~ Marcus J. Borg

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life. ~ Angus Wilson

He had the neurotic's partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular. ~ Guy Vanderhaeghe

Train the body and develop stamina and endurance. But the spirit of competition and power that presides over them is not good, it reflects a distorted vision of life. The root of the martial arts is not there. ~ Taisen Deshimaru

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision. ~ Helen Keller

Dream the biggest dream for yourself. Hold the highest vision of life for yourself. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you. ~ Rufus Wainwright

It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been "hijacked" by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet. ~ Sam Harris

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see. ~ Diego Rivera

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility BY JAMES P. CARSE ~ Daniel H. Pink

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.

Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.

(The Earth in Space and Time §1) ~ H.G. Wells

What is really required to defend 'the West' against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus, the world of the 'Westerners' has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance – and the cult of the skin, the myth of 'safety' and of 'war on war', and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, 'democratic' existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger. ~ Julius Evola

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A different language is a different vision of life. ~ Federico Fellini

Now, standing there with her face so close to mine, I could see the desire, the determination to hold on to an illusion, a vision of life, of Aleppo. ~ Christy Lefteri

To some,Islam is nothing but a code of rules and regulations.But,to those who understand,it is a perfect vision of life ~ Yasmin Mogahed

Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you - catching - crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life - only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp ... ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

I'm an intense person. My own vision of life has always been heavy. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Listen, our history is a history...of failed revolutions. Always, in the end, someone was bought or someone turned traitor. We are a nation of traitors. We are a nation of traitors...we delight in seeing the downfall of others, even friends. ~ F. Sionil Jose

She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory. ~ Rona Jaffe

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: I will understand this, too, I will understand everything. ~ Primo Levi

In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I have respected women from the beginning of my life. ~ Julio Iglesias

Cruelty is seldom forgotten. You feel it as a child. Somebody takes away your toy or thoughtlessly kicks over your sand castle. A beautiful boy walks into your life, sees something he doesn't like or doesn't understand, and painstakingly endeavours to make you feel how much he hates you, to be constantly aware of the flaws that provoke that hatred. And then you grow older and wiser, but you don't forget the cruelty. You can't forget it, because there is nothing stronger, nothing more palpable in the human brain than the memory of mistreatment. ~ L. H. Cosway

Data only exists within the framework of a vision you're building to, a hypothesis of where you're moving to. ~ Reid Hoffman

Wealth is as love in that it destroys him who withholds it but grants life to him who gives freely of it. ~ Kahlil Gibran

In every job, relationship, or life situation there is inevitably some turbulence. Learn to laugh at it. It is part of what you do and who you are. ~ Allen Klein

God, help me let go of my need to be afraid. I welcome peace, trust, acceptance, and safety into my life. I will make a point of listening to my healthy, rational fears, and will relinquish all the others. ~ Melody Beattie

An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex. ~ Diana Athill

Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand - an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature's own exceeding peace, which "passes understanding". That which we seek with passionate longing, here and there, upward and outward; we find at last within ourselves. ~ Richard Maurice Bucke

My cartoon life is in my office, and it's very separate and getting very in my own head. My television life is I'm begging one of the actors to say the line in the way I'd like them to. ~ Bruce Eric Kaplan

The proof of you being alive is having wounds and scars accompanied by some changes in your chemistry, this is the impact of life. ~ Noha Alaa El-Din

My happiness comes from the donation of my life in many ways for the current and for the future generations. ~ Debasish Mridha

The whole world is determined by trade - which is really the blood of the world. The driving force is everyone's desire to have a better life. How? By consuming. For countries, the 'Holy Grail' is economic growth. ~ Yann Arthus-Bertrand

When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the pictures in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rain-forest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with it's up-and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.
-Nita Callahan-
-So You Want To Be A Wizard- ~ Diane Duane

Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as "tragic," in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives. ~ Robert Galbraith

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Avoiding others because they don't suit my way of life is tragic. ~ Annabelle Sabella-Reza

Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
A person's true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all. ~ Imre Kertesz

Pencils will never have the lead knocked out of them. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all."

"Wow," I said. "Did the search pay off?"

"That's the hard part," said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. "I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."

"Waiting for the perfect love?"

"No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don't want it anymore and throw it out the window. That's what I'm looking for."

"I'm not sure that has anything to do with love," I said with some amazement.

"It does," she said. "You just don't know it. There are time in a girl's life when things like that are incredibly important."

"Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?"

"Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. "Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To ~ Haruki Murakami

I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Greater awareness brings about a greater appreciation of the people, places, and things in our lives. The more observant we are, the richer our daily experiences become. ~ Ernest Cadorin

In the bedroom darkness I may visualise a way of making a painting. I can see it - if I do this and this and that and this, my God! Why haven't I seen this until now? I can hardly wait to get to the studio and make the vision real. ~ Jules Olitski

Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits. ~ Alan Sillitoe

For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. ~ Richard Barbrook

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent ... Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life ... The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life's mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as "the truth," is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One man's faith is another man's delusion ... Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.* ANTHONY STORR, FEET OF CLAY ~ Jon Krakauer

What she can't get into her narrow mind is that we're above such things as love. Our whole aim - the whole sense of our life - is to avoid petty illusions that stop us being free and happy. On, on, on! ~ Anton Chekhov

We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhere
Making love while we let the midnight air
Flow through the open window, into our closed hearts
Left bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart ~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail):

...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188) ~ Wayne Greenhaw

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act.

A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.

And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events. They are dull because they are omnipotent. They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love. ~ Abraham Maslow

The fabric of my life is under my skin; [but] it's definitely not something that comes up in a conscious way when I read material. I have an incredible relationship with my mom, so I'm fascinated by mothers who do not have that. But I've never done anything that resembled my life. People always jump to that conclusion, and I wish life were that simple, but it's not. ~ Charlize Theron

All I know is that the six months when I recorded this music was the most productive time of my life, and I'll always remember it as the first time in my life that I ever felt like I was one with my dreams. ~ John Frusciante

Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humored, well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne's romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life. ~ Jane Austen

Iwas not a reader at all, not until I discovered 'The Hobbit.' That changed my life. It gave me the courage to read. It led me to the 'Lord of the Rings' series. And once I'd read that, I knew I could read anything because I had just read thousands of pages. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Every life starts with the same beginning and ends with the same end. The rest is the story, even if you don't understand it, even if you aren't sure which parts are true and which parts are your brain trying to make sense out of smoke. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

Why not end up with her? floats into my line of vision. An answer: she has a better body than most other girls I know. Another one: everyone is interchangeable anyway. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

The life we lead, in other words, leaves its mark in the form of enduring changes in the complex circuitry of the brain-footprints of the experiences we have had, the actions we have taken. This is neuroplasticity. As Mike Merzenich asserted, the mechanisms of neuroplasticity "account for cortical contributions to our idiosyncratic behavioral abilities and, in extension, for the geniuses, the fools, and the idiot savants among us. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam, or of a bargain in his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find it blown into bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded! In fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.

Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like.

It is like a small child going to its father and saying, "Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. ~ C.S. Lewis

Jesus said, Not everyone is mature enough to live a married life. It requires a certain aptitude and grace. Marriage isn't for everyone. Some, from birth seemingly, never give marriage a thought. Others never get asked - or accepted. And some decide not to get married for kingdom reasons. But if you're capable of growing into the largeness of marriage, do it. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

You who so plod amid serious things that you feel it shame to give yourself up even for a few short moments to mirth and joyousness in the land of Fancy; you who think that life hath not to do with innocent laughter that can harm no one; these pages are not for you. ~ Howard Pyle

I don't think that there's necessarily a side to drama that has to be completely bleak. You have to have a flicker of humor 'cause everyone has a flicker of humor, something they find funny in life. ~ Amy Seimetz

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent. ~ Samuel Johnson

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul. ~ Anita Shreve

When the man was disgraced and told to go away, he was allowed to ask all the animals whether any of them would come with him and share his fortunes and his life. There were only two who agreed to come entirely of their own accord, and they were the dog and the cat. And ever since then, those two have been jealous of each other, and each is for ever trying to make man choose which one he likes best. Every man prefers one or the other. ~ Richard Adams