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"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown."
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"It is a great mystery to me how the problems of others seem like simple arithmetic while my own appear as complicated as a calculus equation."
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Personal Development
"Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood."
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Personal Development
"Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer."
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Personal Development
"The negative way of thinking based on constant complaints, strains, and objections of discontent steals our energy."
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Personal Development
"Words don't have the power to hurt you, unless that person meant more to you than you are willing to confess."
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Personal Development
"Who has fear? The one who has greed has fear."
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Personal Development
"For how long are the people who seek for the approval of others keep putting their self-worth in the hands of people?"
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Personal Development
"Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness."
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Personal Development
"Physiology and Psychology are not at all separate from each other. Rather they are deeply intertwined."
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Personal Development
"Overriding the old information in your mind with new information is easy, but to actually go further than just putting a veneer over your old mindset is the way forward."
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Personal Development
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"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
Empathy
"It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after."
Ethics
"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
Activism
"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
Philosophy
"Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act."
Activism
"Beauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears."
Beauty
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
Despair
"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
Forgiveness
"The self is...a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on."
Identity
"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."
Feminism
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