I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
—Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending
Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.
—Henri J. M. Nouwen
A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.
—Michael Winner
It's always been and always will be the same in the world: the horse does the work, and the coachman is tipped.
—Unknown
A child does not thrive on what he is prevented from doing, but on what he actually does.
—Marcelene Cox
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.
—Abbie Hoffman
Don't let them tame you!
—Isadora Duncan
Our noses too, and our eyes and ears, are political instruments, protesters. An aesthetic response is a political action.… We know instinctively, aesthetically, when a fish stinks, when the sense of beauty is offended. Standing for these moments—and these moments occur each day, within every airless office building, seated in each crippling chair, inundated by senseless noise and fattened on industrial food—standing for our responses, these aesthetic reverberations of truth in the soul, may be the primary civic act of the citizen, the origin of caution and of the precautionary principle itself, with its warnings to stop, look, and listen.
—James Hillman
It is the people who have no say in making wars who suffer most from the consequences of them.
—Philippa Carr
If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.
—Greg McKeown
You will never find time for anything. If you want time, then you must make it.
—Charles Buxton
It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired; you quit when the gorilla is tired.
—Robert Strauss
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
—David Foster Wallace
I couldn't escape him, now or ever. He'd always be there, consuming my every thought, my heart locked in his hands. I was drawn to him by forces I couldn't control, let alone escape.
—Becca Fitzpatrick in Silence