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"Virtually every tribe in the march towards civilization developed its tailored made initiation practices. In America, sports are part of the test for a young man's initiation into manhood."
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"I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during 'God save the King'. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so 'enlightened' that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions."

"Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own."

"Your insult has offended me. If we were at the Peaks, we would have to duel in traditional alil'tiki'i fashion.""Which is what?" Teft asked. "With spears?"Rock laughed. "No, no. We upon the Peaks are not barbarians like you down here.""How then?" Kaladin asked, genuinely curious."Well," Rock said, "is involving much mudbeer and singing.""How's that a duel?"He who can still sing after the most drinks is winner. Plus, soon' everyone is so drunk that they forget what argument was about."Teft laughed. "Beats knives at dawn, I suppose."

"Cultural values change with times, unless they are built on an absolute standard of values and virtues. This standard must be afterwards well-guarded and protected."

"To the traditional Indians, terms such as "intercourse, "penis, "vagina, "clitoris, "semen, "masturbation, "breasts, etc. are exclusive possessions of the night. The traditional Indians perceive these terms as something "dirty. No matter how old they look, they really never grow up to talk and discuss about sex."

"So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect-only if they happen to be talking about Judaism."

"I reserve magick for necessities, a bit like the good china. It has a time and a place, but eating peanut butter sandwiches off it each morning chips and devalues it."
Explore more quotes by Kilroy J. Oldster

"The human mind " a product of the brain " controls our ability to adapt to a hostile or friendly environment. Human beings are composed of fields of energy, some of which forces are positive, and other force fields are negative. We can use constructive reason to penetrate only a limited segment of the human mind, which projects discernible logical thought process. A person's mind also houses dark areas of reality, the mysterious apparatus that eludes the grasp of human reason. We can never express the truth of a person with a precise lucid principle. A person must travel beyond realism in order to explore every facet of his or her being and live his or her most cherished dreams."

"A writer's amulets include explication, free association, parallelism, antithesis, and epiphany to create a silhouette of that which heretofore did not exist and now speaks with an autonomous, ghostly reverberation."

"Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self."

"Life never ceases having a meaning for a humble person. The freedom of choice, the sovereignty that we hold over our own souls, enables a person to discover the meaning of his or her own life every day, even in suffering or death."

"None of us commences life utterly alone. We each carry within our granular mass the protoplasm residue of past generations' ideas, customs, values, infatuations, prejudices, ethics, and mores. The lees wrought from our seedlings contribute to the social order that oversees a newborn's future. How we conduct ourselves in the here and now emulates our heritage, delineates the parameters of the present culture, and sets the embryonic stage for the emergent ethos of our future and for the generations of people whom we will never meet."

"No age of life is inglorious. Youth has its merits, but living to a ripe old age is the true statement of value. Aging is the road that we take to discern our character. Fame and fortune can elude us, but character is immortal. We must encounter a sufficient variety of experiences including both failures and accomplishments in order to gain nobility of character."

"We tend to live down to other people's expectations, especially the people closest to us. It is more difficult to obtain approval of people who hold us in high regard than to accept the lower standards that other people hold of us."

"We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present."

"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."

"Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist's case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person's life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously."
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