What A Good Morning Quotes

With technology today you can sing like a frog and sound good. And then when you come on stage, what do you do. Some of those artists never toured, probably just hype. ~ Angelique Kidjo

As a result, much of what Luke has to say on the matter of gender lies hidden under layers of interpretation that we have received from earlier generations. It is therefore urgent, for the good of the church, that we continue unearthing what has been hidden. In this task, the many women who today are devoted to the careful study of the biblical text are making an important contribution. ~ Justo L. Gonzalez

Don't you know yet, he said, that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance, to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. Even in England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made.
The demagogue carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding one's own vanity--the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of the day after to-morrow. Just as good and otherwise harmless people will join you in ecstasies over your collection without having the slightest notion in what its marvellousness really consists. [The informer] ~ Joseph Conrad

Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope.

In the following passage, Nabokov helped blur the distinctions which I want to draw:

...'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Orwell blurred the same distinctions when, in one of his rare descents into rant, "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," he wrote exactly the sort of thing Nabokov loathed:

You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take side ~ Richard M. Rorty

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked. ~ Jay Parini

You are not quite ready yet, though. For the next six months, practice until your arms ache and your lips bleed. The suffering will be good for you. A slight smile crossed the conductor's face. If you haven't already found a woman who will break your heart, find one. What we played tonight, especially the Mozart, requires suffering. ~ Ron Rash

Everyone is really afraid of getting out there and not being good. That's the challenge: To be afraid and know people are staring at you and know you might not do all that well, but you do it anyway. What singles out the successful athlete from the ones who never make it past a plateau, it that successful athletes risk failure, even though they are terrified. ~ Aimee Mullins

I am not a naturally optimistic person. I'm too in my own head to be a constant source of cheer. I have to work at happy. Dark and twisty is where my brain likes to settle. So I can use some reminders of what is good and optimistic and glass-half-full about this world. And nothing does that for me like the faces and souls of my tiny humans. ~ Shonda Rhimes

Songwriters: DAVID GRAY

Please forgive me if I act alittle strange
For I know not what I do
Feels like lightning running through my veins
Everytime I look at you
Everytime I look at you

Help me out here all my words are falling short
And there's so much I want to say
Want to tell you just how good it feels
When you look at me that way
When you look at me that way
Throw a stone and watch the ripples flow
Moving out across the bay
Like a stone I fall into your eyes
Deep into some mystery
Deep into that mystery

I got half a mind to scream out loud
I got half a mind to die
So I won't ever have to lose you girl
Won't ever have to say goodbye
I won't ever have to lie
Won't ever have to say goodbye

Please forgive me if I act alittle strange
For I know not what I do
Feels like lightning running through my veins
Everytime I look at you
Everytime I look at you
Everytime I look at you
Everytime I look at you ~ David Grey

A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it. Belief leads to various forms of fundamentalism and shuts down the curiosity and inquiry that are essential to open the way for awakening and what lies beyond awakening. A good spiritual teaching is something that you work with and apply. In doing so, it works on you (often in a hidden way) and helps reveal to you the Truth (and falseness) that lies within you. ~ Adyashanti

When God Created Mothers"

When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one."

And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands."

The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."

It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have."

That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded.

One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word."

God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...."

I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamb ~ Erma Bombeck

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man. ~ Ray Charles

But there's this thing in her voice, like what my mom called "doublespeak." Saying one thing and meaning another. Aunt Nora told me it was leftover from English rule. She said, "That's the only good thing to ever come of colonialism, Kevin. The Irish can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip. ~ Brian Malloy

I thought if people were going to talk about what I wear, wouldn't it be good if they were talking about who designed it, who made it and if that's a Scottish company, so teaming up with Totty Rocks has been fantastic. ~ Nicola Sturgeon

I've worked with Emily Skinner and I've seen Linda Balgord's work. I saw Harvey Keitel at the call-backs. But generally I don't know many people. They're not only good performers; they're really good singers! This show is for people who have more of a history in reading music. From what I already know about the ensemble, it's going to be great. And I can't wait to meet the rest of them. They're the real deal. ~ Max Von Essen

One form of prayer moves us particularly to take up the task of evangelization and to seek the good of others: it is the prayer of intercession. Let us peer for a moment into the heart of Saint Paul, to see what his prayer was like. It was full of people: " ... I constantly pray with you in every one of my prayers for all of you ... because I hold you in my heart" (Phil 1:4, 7). Here we see that intercessory prayer does not divert us from true contemplation, since authentic contemplation always has a place for others. ~ Pope Francis

The opening line of her last column was: You know you really don't fit in with the other housewives you meet when the only way you can contribute to a discussion about babies is by saying, "Yes, that's what my mother used to do." It went on to talk about how a woman could climb Everest, teach schoolchildren in Cambodia and win the Booker Prize but some people would still think she had good news only when she produced progeny. ~ Shweta Ganesh Kumar

The priest rubbed his bruised shoulder, the eyes within the feline mask glaring at Stonny. At Gruntle's words he faced the Daru again. 'These are not matters open to debate, Mortal Sword. You are what you are-'
'I'm a caravan guard captain, and damned good at it. When I'm sober, that is.'
'You are the master of war in the name of the Lord of Summer-'
We'll call that a hobby. ~ Steven Erikson

Think about Tucker. Think about a good memory, she whispers in my mind. Remember a moment when you loved him. And just like that, I do.
"What did the fish say when it hit a concrete wall?" he asked me. We're sitting on the bank of a stream and he's tying a fly onto my fishing rod, wearing a cowboy hat and red lumberjack-style flannel shirt over a gray tee. So adorable.
"What?" I say, he grins. Unbelievable of how gorgeous he is. And that he's mine. He loves me and I love him.
"Dam!" he says. ~ Cynthia Hand

Famously, the trick to good writing is bleeding onto the page. I picture the male writer who coined this phrase, sitting at his typewriter, the blank sheet before him. What kind of blood did he imagine? Blood from a vein in his arm? Or a leg? Perhaps a head wound? Presumably it was not blood from a cervix. I have so much of this blood, this period blood, this pregnancy blood, this miscarriage blood, this not-pregnant-again blood, this perimenopausal blood. It just keeps coming and I just keep soaking it up. Stuffing bleached cotton into my vagina to stem the flow, padding my underwear, sticking on the night pads 'with wings', hoping not to leak on some man's sheets, or rip off too much pubic hair with the extra-secure adhesive strips. Covering up with 'period pants', those unloved dingy underwear choices pulled out from the bank of the drawer every month. And all along, I was wrong. I should have been sitting down at my desk and spilling it across the page, a shocking red to fill the white. ~ Emilie Pine

My advice on getting a raise is what everybody's advice is: to become a confident negotiator; but that is so hard. My admiration for women who are good at that is unbridled. Women in general have a harder time talking about money with their bosses. ~ Jill Abramson

Now the big danger is to avoid doing anything, unless you have a surety, unless you have an assurance that you'll be successful. It's not about being successful. It's about being faithful. The good is worth doing, because it's good. And who knows what the results will be? ~ Ray McGovern

While on the one hand," he said, "our most prominent scientists, the inexhaustible heroes of this perennial confusion, have finally and somewhat unfortunately extricated themselves from the metaphor of godhead, they have immediately fallen into the trap of regarding this oppressive history as some kind of triumphant march, a supernatural progress following, what they call, the victory of 'will and intellect', and though, as you know, I am no longer capable of being the least surprised by this, I must confess to you I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration for them that we have climbed out of the trees. Do they think it's good like this? I find nothing amusing in it. Furthermore it doesn't fit us properly: you only have to consider how long, even after thousands of years of practice, we can keep going on two legs. Half a day, my dear friend, and we shouldn't forget it. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

My parents say you're no good, Elijah." I exhaled and killed the cigarette in the grass.
Laughing, Eli's eyes went to my lips and his hands touched my bare midriff. "Really? And what do you say?"
He had brought his lips so close to mine that it became hard to think about my next words when all I wanted to do was crush my mouth to his. I wanted him to completely consume me. "I think you're broken," I finally got out, and Eli arched a brow. "But I think I'm broken too. I just don't know it yet. ~ Nadege Richards

I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began.
"And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all."
"I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly.
"Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin. ~ Iain Pears

Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the need to see every event in this world not only as an occasion for God's grace, but as a positive determination of God's will whereby he brings to pass a comprehensive design that, in the absence of any single one of these events, would not have been possible. It may seem that this is to draw only the finest of logical distinction, one so fine indeed as to amount to little more than a sophistry. Some theologians - Calvin, for instance - have denied that the distinction between what God wills and what he permits has any meaning at all. And certainly there is no unanimity in the history of Christian exegesis on this matter. Certain classic Western interpretations of Paul's treatment of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and of the hardened heart of Israel in Romans 9 have taken it as a clear statement of God's immediate determination of his creatures' wills. But in the Eastern Christian tradition, and in the thought of many of the greatest Western theologians, the same argument has often been understood to assert no more than that God in either case allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course, or even - like a mire in the light of the sun - to harden the outpouring of God's fiery mercy, and always for the sake of a greater good that will perhaps redound even to the benef ~ David Bentley Hart

The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

The hell with your secrets," shouted Bonnie.
"Language, language! How about this: One of you has kept a secret all
their life, and is doing so even now. One of you is a murderer - and I am
not speaking of a vampire, or a mercy killing, or anything like that. And
then there is the question of the true identity of Sage - good luck on your
research there!One of you has already had their memory erased - and I don't mean
Damon or Stefan. And what about the secret, stolen kiss? And then there is
the question of what happened the night of the motel, that it seems that nobody
but Elena can recall. You might ask her sometime about her theories about
Camelot. ~ L.J.Smith

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. ~ Edward Abbey

I knew Chaz was a good guy, if misguided and gullible. He'd swallowed Buck's side of what happened between us, had argued with Erin that maybe I was drunk that night and didn't remember everything clearly. He was probably one of those boys to whom rapists were ugly men who jumped out of bushes, assaulting random girls. Rapists weren't your nice-guy coworker, or your frat brother, or your best friend. Maybe it never occurred to him that his best friend was capable of ripping a girl's self-confidence away in the span of five minutes. ~ Tammara Webber

Darn! what a beautiful night!
Heading towards Pandara Road-Gulati Restaurant, with open windows of my baby sedan and this broad chest guy with big brown eyes.
He hums the oldies well and his Issey Miyake is making me lose the grip over my senses.
One more thing is distracting me, he ain't wearing anything inside but a transparent white, V necked, cotton short Kurta.
I can see the hair winking out and his collar bones!!
Not only men get excited by transparent dresses but women as well.
His broad shoulders and chest is my weakness and he knows it.
This man is not doing good to me!
It's a crime to seduce in this way, when you are not touched, when you are distracted by the aroma of his skin, when you know, he is well aware of the intentions..
when you can't do anything except getting seduced by the corner stretching smile of a man with animal instinct..
I certainly am missing myself to be tied up to the bedpost,choked and groaning his name! ~ Himmilicious

I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types - in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!" Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said: "Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature. ~ Anton Chekhov

My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Another lesson is that smart professionals might give an instruction to a program based on a sensible-seeming and normally sound assumption (e.g. that trading volume is a good measure of market liquidity), and that this can produce catastrophic results when the program continues to act on the instruction with iron-clad logical consistency even in the unanticipated situation where the assumption turns out to be invalid. The algorithm just does what it does; and unless it is a very special kind of algorithm, it does not care that we clasp our heads and gasp in dumbstruck horror at the absurd inappropriateness of its actions. This is a theme that we will encounter again. ~ Nick Bostrom

I've tested my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, "in order to know myself." This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life. In front of your very eyes I endured a slap from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage publicly. But what to apply my strength to--that I have never seen, nor do I see it now, despite your encouragements in Switzerland, which I believed. I am as capable now as ever before of wishing to do a good deed, and I take pleasure in that; along with it, I wish for evil and also feel pleasure. But both the one and the other, as always, are too shallow, and are never very much. My desires are far too weak; they cannot guide. One can cross a river on a log, but not on a chip. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Topeka meant, "a good place to find potatoes". That made Dorothy laugh. But any place is what you make it said etta. You've got to make it home. You've got to do it for yourself ... It's difficult because everybody wants to be loved and you think you can't find a home unless you are loved by somebody, anybody. But it's not true. Sometimes you can learn to live without being loved. It's terribly hard, but you can do it. The trick is to remember what it's like to be loved. ~ Geoff Ryman

For me, if its television, if it's theater, if it's film, and it's good, I don't make much of distinction between the 3. I think there's only so many great stories out there. If you get the chance to be a part of one, it doesn't matter what it is. ~ Tom Cavanagh

Every good story has a conflict. Never being fully part of any world is ours. This is what makes our stories and memories rich and worth hearing. We live between worlds, sometimes comfortable in one, sometimes in the other, but only truly comfortable in the space between. This is our conflict and the heart of our story. ~ Marilyn Gardner