top of page
"Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence."
Standard
Customized
More

"We are what we think about and meditate on. Look around people! America is a buffet of violence, a total immersion."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves - and other animals."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy."
Author Name
Personal Development

"We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Culture and holiness must be made compatible in the environment of the kingdom."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The traditional Indian mind has been for centuries, and still is, first religious, and then everything else."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."
Author Name
Personal Development

"All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don't get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture!"
Author Name
Personal Development

"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely."
Author Name
Personal Development
More

"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable."
Family

"Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this - and out of nothing - can still count the hairs of my head."
Belief

"Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are."
Truth

"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
Books

"The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work has been stillborn."
Art

"For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone."
Creativity

"All right, all right, you go right on thinking you an act of God created in his image, and I'll go right on thinking I'm descended from an ape. When you look in the mirror I should think you'd feel pretty discouraged; I wouldn't be happy to look at myself and think that my faces is an Imago Dei. It wouldn't make me feel I'd done very well by God. But when I look in the mirror and that I'm descended from an ape, I feel I've done remarkably well."
Perspective

"One thing I have discovered since I've been ill, though, is that nobody ever knows anybody, and maybe least of all the people who are closest to them. Sort of a business of not being able to see the trees for the woods. We all live in isolated prisons of our own bodies and there's no real contact with any other human being. That's what sex is, in a way, isn't it, a desperate striving for contact? With which cheerful Thought for Today, I will bid you good afternoon."
Behavior

"Is it that bad, Mrs. Bowen?" Clement asked.Emily shook her head. "Gertrude's been hurt and so she's generalizing. It's a pretty good country on the whole, and the people in it, too. We have our faults and they may be glaring, and we have individuals we may not be proud of, but take us by and large we'll stick our necks our for something we believe in, and that in itself may be a fault, but it's one I like.""Bravo," Abe said."
Society

"Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories."
Religion
bottom of page