We Are From The Earth Quotes

We are all visitors in the world and we are crowned guests invited to feast. We depart from the world and leave the world the way we found it. We could own the world yet the world is our master. ~ David Ssembajjo

Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe. ~ David F. Wells

We need to increasingly live from the fullness of our whole hearts in order to become who we are meant to be and play the significant role that is ours to play. We want to be awake and alert. We want to be women who live their lives on purpose. ~ Stasi Eldredge

I called Mom from the hotel during the period of peace, I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was Black and sensationless. All There was in the room was my voice and mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me-this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one since, all we are is our voice. ~ Douglas Coupland

The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are
little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be
delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance.
Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light ~ Timothy Leary

Within each of us there is an Owl, a Rabbit, an Eeyore, and a Pooh. For too long, we have chosen the way of Owl and Rabbit. Now, like Eeyore, we complain about the results. But that accomplishes nothing. If we are smart, we will choose the way of Pooh. As if from far away, it calls to us with the voice of a child's mind. It may be hard to hear at times, but it is important just the same, because without it, we will never find our way through the forest. ~ Benjamin Hoff

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. ~ C.S. Lewis

I've been around Congress long enough to know there are issues we may never see eye-to-eye from the opposite aisle, but we should all agree that our job is to move America forward and benefit the people. ~ Charles B. Rangel

The process of dying is a difficult one, with many fears and anxieties, but it is also a very mysterious and wondrous process. It involves both the body and the soul in the greatest transition we are ever called to make. When I sit vigil with those who are at the edge of death, moments away from crossing over, I am constantly in awe of the process happening in front of me, one that each one of us must eventually go through. ~ Megory Anderson

The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species. ~ Jock Sturges

Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike. ~ Carl Sandburg

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition. ~ Josef Pieper

In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life. ~ Donald Miller

The fact that Western Muslims are free means that they can have enormous impact. But it would be wrong to claim that we are imposing our ways on the West. New ideas are now coming from the West. To be traditional is not so much a question of protecting ourselves as to be traditionalist in principle. ~ Tariq Ramadan

The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or - if they think there is not - at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. ~ C.S. Lewis

More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. ~ George Orwell

A really sublime moment is that when the last ray of light breaks in upon the soul, and marshals into a single group all the scattered disconnected truths there. There is such a vast difference between the moment which follows, and the moment which precedes this one, between what we were before, and what we are after, that the word grace has been invented to convey the idea of this magic stroke, of this light from on high. ~ Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…

The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.

The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: 'Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on. ~ Edward Thomas

From the opening sentence, it is clear that we are in the presence of a writer with a distinctive voice and uncanny ability to capture the bewilderment and burgeoning anger of a boy struggling to remain true to himself while navigating the hypocritical system he finds himself trapped in … what makes Boy on a Wire much more than a bleak coming-of-age story is Doust's sharp wit. "Justice not only prevails at Grammar School, it is rampant." If you know an angry teenager, give this to him.' - The Age ~ Jon Doust

What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we can recognize elements of them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers. ~ Thomas C. Foster

No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory. ~ Joe Rogan

Failure of success is not race-related; it's not socioeconomics-related; it is really predictable, based on principles that are laid down by God the Creator by which we are supposed to function. If we find them and obey them, success becomes inevitable. That's why I was able to move from rats to 40,000 feet in the air in my own aircraft. ~ Myles Munroe

our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush growing by the side of the mountain and hangs on to it for dear life. The bush is laden with wild strawberries that hang tantalizingly near his mouth. As the tiger snarls above his head and a gorge stretches beneath his dangling feet, the man takes a bite from a luscious berry. 'How sweet,' he exclaims as he relishes its taste.

I do not remember the moral attached to the fable. It might have been a commentary on the ephemeral nature of life, on how foolish it is to imagine that there is happiness to be found in the world when death is certain and likely to happen at any time. Or it might have been an exhortation to seize the day and squeeze the most out of every moment, for, in any case, we are
all going to die. It might have made a reasonably good ad for strawberries, which were so good that you simply had to eat them, even if it was the last thing you did. ~ Indu Muralidharan

When I let my heart grow cold, my preaching is cold; and when it is confused, my preaching is confused; and so I can often observe also in the best of my hearers, that when I have grown cold in preaching, they have grown cold too; and the next prayers which I have heard from them have been too like my preaching. We are the nurses of Christ's little ones. If ~ Richard Baxter

Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality. We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now ... Everything that is worthwhile in human civilization has not only originated from but has been inspired by dreams, by imagination. ~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

We are unlike our animal kin in another way. Only human beings kill and die for the sake of beliefs about themselves and the nature of the world. Looking for sense in their lives, they attack others who find meaning in beliefs different from their own. The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonising religion. It goes with being human. ~ John N. Gray

There was a time when wen we did not form all our words as we do now, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word "&" was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

Humanity learned to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than "&" itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than "&"?

An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs' width from where we began.

& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it's going, as we all must do. ~ China Mieville

Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature ~ Virginia Woolf

Like a bee in a flower bed, the human brain naturally flits from one thought to the next. In the high-speed workplace, where data and headlines come thick and fast, we are all under pressure to think quickly. Reaction, rather than reflection, is the order of the day. To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, we fill up every spare moment with mental stimulation…Keeping the mind active makes poor use of our most precious resource. True, the brain can work wonders in high gear. But it will do so much more if given the chance to slow down from time to time. Shifting the mind into lower gear can bring better health, inner calm, enhanced concentration and the ability to think more creatively. ~ Carl Honore

Canada is an Aboriginal country as well as a settler country. We rarely see ourselves that way, but it is past time that we started doing so. The fact that settlers are in a significant majority does not take away from the simple fact that when Europeans made first contact with the northern half of North America, there were millions of people already here. From the Beothuk in Newfoundland – a population completely wiped out by disease and violence – across every corner of Canada to the far west and north, Canada's first people had built a civilization, a way of life thousands of years old and rich in diversity. They were not "savages" (as they were called, in French and English), nor were they "ignorant wretches", nor were they less than people. They had developed complex societies with distinct languages, systems of governance; they were real people with a real way of life. ~ Bob Rae