Quotes about kindlehighlight
Rick Warren - The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here for?
Humility is not thinking less of yourself it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others.
Rick Warren - The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here for?
We’re not completely happy here because we’re not supposed to be! Earth is not our final home we were created for something much better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide...
John Steinbeck - The Short Novels: Tortilla Flat / The Moon is Down / The Red Pony / Of Mice and Men / Cannery Row / The Pearl
It was not a safe thing to lead Joe into temptation he had no resistance to it at all.
Robert J. Sawyer - WWW: Watch
Secrecy was the problem transparency the obvious cure.
Karen Essex -
One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman. “They’re nasty bits about famous people everyone will want them.
Various - The Golden Age of Science Fiction
Horror is a feeling that cannot last long human nature is incapable of supporting it.
Benjamin Balint - Running Commentary: PUBLICATION CANCELLED
Commentary would come to life in 1945 amid widespread predictions that mass unemployment would resume as soon as war production ebbed. But it wouldn’t take long after the war to see that the dire prophecies had failed. It became clear that Western democracy was far from finished American power seemed limitless.
Deborah Treisman - 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker
I was just trying to remove a stain I made a bigger stain.
Mark Hurst - Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
Bit literacy means letting the bits go anything else perpetuates the problem.
George R.R. Martin -
It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.
Frank Herbert -
Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad
Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.
Mike Norton - Fighting For Redemption
Fall. Stand. Learn. Adapt.
David Bentley Hart - Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.
Scott O'Connor - Untouchable
They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.
David Bentley Hart - Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant.
Frank Luntz - Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary
Winners recognize that even when they aren’t physically selling a product, they are always selling themselves. Every human interaction is an opportunity to connect—and then to sell.
Nic Marks - The Happiness Manifesto
There are two main reasons why this assumption is wrong. First, once basic material needs have been met, there is very little evidence that pursuing financial prosperity generates much extra happiness for individuals or for nations. Second, by blindly pursuing economic growth, we are creating a whole set of social and environmental issues that will undermine the potential happiness and well-being of future generations.
Nic Marks - The Happiness Manifesto
The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability.
Tim Sanders - Today We Are Rich: Harnessing The Power Of Total Confidence
Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
Robert L. Millet - Men of Valor: The Powerful Impact of a Righteous Man
I believe the message in the hymn “Rise Up, O Men of God” (Hymns, no. 324) is a plea, a call, a divine invitation for us to rise above the telestial tinsel of our time; to deny ourselves of ungodliness and clothe ourselves in the mantle of holiness; to reach and stretch and grasp for that spiritual direction and sacred empowerment promised to the Lord’s agents, to those charged to act in the name of our Principal, Jesus Christ; and to point the way to salvation and deliverance and peace in a wor
John Fowles -
I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.’ ‘I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.
Penny Simkin - and All Other Labor Companions
Try not to take it personally if the mother criticizes you or tells you to stop doing something that you expected to be helpful. Just say, “Sorry,” and stop doing it. Don’t try to explain why you did it or express frustration with her. She is really saying that labor is so difficult right now that nothing helps. You are the safest person for her to lash out at. Later, she will probably apologize.
Robert L. Millet - Men of Valor: The Powerful Impact of a Righteous Man
Points to Ponder 1. What does it mean to “grow up unto the Lord” (Helaman 3:21)? 2. How often do I think about what kind of man I want to be? How often do I think about what others will remember most about me? What kind of priesthood legacy am I leaving? 3. The Prophet Lehi pleaded with his sons repeatedly to “Awake! and arise from the dust” (2 Nephi 1:14). In what ways do I need to wake up? How is it that I have been called to arise from the dust? (see D&C 113:7–10). 4. Peter was counseled by t
Lina Gardiner - Grave Illusions
grand a pop for the vampires who survived their first does.
Tim Sanders - Today We Are Rich: Harnessing The Power Of Total Confidence
and her answer to it because she’s driving the conversation. In
Robert L. Millet - Men of Valor: The Powerful Impact of a Righteous Man
Lehi’s message, given some six centuries before the coming of the Messiah, seems very applicable to our day and time: “O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound. . . . Awake! and arise from the dust, and hear the words of a trembling parent. . . . Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity. . . .
Frank Luntz - Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary
THE TRUTH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION • American fifteen-year-olds rank thirty-fifth out of fifty-seven developed countries in math and literacy. • 30 percent of public school students don’t graduate from high school. • Every day, 7,000 kids drop out of high school. • Of the 50 million children currently in public school, 15 million of them will drop out. • 25 percent of all public school math teachers did not major in mathematics or a math-related subject at a college or university. • Less th
Frank Luntz - Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary
Winners know what makes people tick by effectively tapping into our fears and aspirations. By listening very carefully and then repeating almost word-for-word exactly what they’ve heard, winners know how to articulate compelling needs—and products to satisfy those needs—that people didn’t even know they wanted.
John Fowles -
But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.
Walter Ralston Martin - The Kingdom of the Cults
It was Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse who said that simply because a person is a member of a specific denomination, there is no reason to suppose that the entire denomination is represented by that person’s theology,
Bill Bryson -
The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.
Stephen King - UR
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…
Jason Fried - ReWork
Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out?
George Orwell - 1984
That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
Jason Fried - ReWork
The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they’re imagining a hundred different things.
Terry Brooks - The Elf Queen of Shannara
When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn’t matter all that much—that those in here mattered more. You know something? It’s not so hard really. You just have to get past the fear.
Robert J. Sawyer - WWW: Watch
He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.
Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt’s surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn’t scent them. It was a beautiful day—no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle—he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon s
Jason Fried -
Don’t be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that’s sustainable and profitable, whether it’s big or small, should be
William J. Bennett - From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom 1914-1989
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,
Robert J. Sawyer - WWW: Wake
And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.
Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked
William J. Bennett - From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom 1914-1989
and line of cases. Justice Byron R. "Whizzer" White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of "raw judicial power," as it took these decisions from the states and enshrined their determination in the Supreme Court's reasoning.
Peter Seibel - Coders at Work
And once I realized that code I write never fucking goes away and I'm going to be a maintainer for life. I get comments about blog posts that are almost 10 years old. "Hey, I found this code. I found a bug," and I'm suddenly maintaining code.
Robert J. Sawyer - WWW: Watch
Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we’d have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs.” She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. “Big cats, too. They’re faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.
William J. Bennett - From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom 1914-1989
Eisenhower has been much criticized for his failure publicly to endorse the Court's decision. But he felt that doing so would set an undesirable precedent. If a president endorsed decisions he agreed with, might he feel compelled to oppose decisions he did not agree with? And what would that do to the rule of law? "The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold ... the constitutional processes.... I will obey."3
William J. Bennett - From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom 1914-1989
American soldiers were dying in frigid Korea. One of our greatest generals told us that the president and his team were not trying to win. And some strident voices were saying that that was because they didn't want to win,
Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
I am not a Federalist,” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind
money I could hardly think of it. “Go on, take it.
Peter Seibel - Coders at Work
He came in and took a piss in my hotel bathroom without even closing the door as I'm standing right there. I'm like, "Alright. You're comfortable." It was like we knew each other for four or five years, even though we had never met.
David Wong - John Dies at the End
There was a sound like a garbage bag of pudding dropped off a tall building onto a sidewalk. Robert had erupted, chunks slapping off the walls in every direction.
Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine
Table of Contents
Ben Yagoda - for Better And/Or Worse
designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word “ampersand” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced “and.” When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself ], ‘and.’” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.” The symbol is a favorite of law and
Alexandre Dumas - The Borgias Celebrated Crimes
these groups followed some solitary passer-by, hurrying his steps; one after another the doors were closed, one after
Nick Webb - Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams
long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produces the same elegant solution, as if there were no choic
Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
legal investigation. As Clinton noted, “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful.
Matt Rudd - William Walker's First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story
be as good as our first honeymoon?’ Friday 7 October A
Peter Seibel - Coders at Work
Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that.
Matt Rudd - William Walker's First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story
on. I’m getting cold.’ Clutching the pluckers, I call her. ‘Right,
Peter Seibel - Coders at Work
Fitzpatrick: Back when I was doing Perl-even for people that knew Perl really well-I would recommend MJD's Higher-Order Per!. The book is really fun in that it starts somewhat simple and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I know what a closure is." And then it just continues to fuck with your head. By the end of the book, you're just blown away.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench
Sweet allowed her pregnancy to get the better of her and simply sat down. Reenie’s lips set into a straight, emotionless line. Mawu no longer talked back, the words she did speak taking on an air of vapidity. Philip was chained at night, no longer trusted. So it was no wonder that Lizzie sought out the white woman then.
Ian McEwan - Saturday
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Seth Godin - Poke the Box
Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about “let’s see” and “try.” If there’s no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.
Ben Goldacre -
This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering.
Ian McEwan - Saturday
It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.
Gerald L. Sittser -
the book is intended to show how it is possible to live in and be enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it.
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.
Walter Ralston Martin - The Kingdom of the Cults
Truth by definition is exclusive. If truth were all-inclusive, nothing would be false.
Gerald L. Sittser -
I had no way of anticipating the adjustments I would have to make and the suffering I would have to endure in the months and years ahead.
Ben Goldacre -
In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.
Ian McEwan - Saturday
Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring a
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child—though equally dependent and friend
Charles Hayes -
A popular management term used to describe efficiency is called "working smart." We are told that if we work smart instead of hard, we will be more productive. But if we do work "smart" then we are likely to have idle time, and if we are idle we will likely be thought of as being lazy or worthless.
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand—when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart.
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
Ian McEwan - Saturday
Or he was simply pretending—like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.
Walter Ralston Martin - The Kingdom of the Cults
Within the theological structure of the cults there is considerable truth, all of which, it might be added, is drawn from biblical sources, but so diluted with human error as to be more deadly than complete falsehood.
Mark Hurst - Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
Bits have unique properties, then, that we can use to our advantage: they’re super-small, super-fast, easily acquired and created and copied and shared in near-infinite quantity, protected from the ravages of time, and free from the limitations of distance and space. In practice, though, bits reveal several paradoxes: they’re weightless, but they weigh us down; they don’t take up any space, but they always seem to pile up; they’re created in an instant, but they can last forever; they move quick
Thomas Frank - What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
We’re all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.
Thomas Frank - What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism.
Thomas Frank - What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state’s dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state’s progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the ninetie
John Zogby - The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream
AN IMPERIALIST POWER THAT ACTS ON ITS OWN REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS. 18–29 30–49 50–64 65+ Improper/Somewhat improper 86% 73 69 67 Somewhat proper/Proper 3 13 20 17 No other group we studied—not Democrats generally, not self-described progressives or libertarians, not readers of The New York Times—had a greater spread between the two extremes.
John Zogby - The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream
nothing knee-jerk about their politics. Two out of three of them say that abortion is “always” or “usually” morally wrong. They are far more likely than voters age thirty and over to identify themselves as politically “strictly independent.” In fact, more than any other generation I’ve tracked in my polling, Globals seem determined to find a middle ground on the hot-button issues of the day and to decide each one on a case by case basis, not because their party leaders are urging them in one dir
John Zogby - The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream
four meta-movements that separately and together are redefining the American dream: living with limits, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity.
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight.
Walter Ralston Martin - The Kingdom of the Cults
By the term cult I mean nothing derogatory to any group so classified. A cult, as I define it, is any religious group which differs significantly in one or more respects as to belief or practice from those religious groups which are regarded as the normative expressions of religion in our total culture.
Charles Hayes -
Self-knowledge liberates us from the frustration of ignorance, while simultaneously nurturing and supporting our capacity for intelligence. Objectivity
Neal Stephenson -
How slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench
plans if you were going to go with this woman? come here.
Isaac Asimov - Robot
The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.
Anne Rice - The Tale of the Body Thief
I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn't only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now simply because I had claimed her in another way before.
Isaac Asimov - Robot
They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do.
Arthur W. Pink -
We remember, also, how that it is becoming increasingly difficult in these strenuous days for those who are desirous of studying the deeper things of God to find the time which such study requires.
Jean Plaidy - The Courts of Love: The Story of Eleanor of Aquitaine
And there he lay in his bed, a broken man, worn out by a way of life which had been thrust upon him because of the antics of a wayward pig.
Mark Batterson - In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day: How To Survive And Thrive When Opportunity Roars
Dr. Neal Roese makes a fascinating distinction between two types of regret: regrets of action and regrets of inaction.
Arthur W. Pink -
The craving today is for something light and spicy, and few have patience, still less desire, to examine carefully that which would make a demand both upon their hearts and