Quotes by Professors - Page 4

The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.

Chinua Achebe

To rule out the possibility of belief in another's reality is to encapsulate that reality and, thus, to impose implicity the hegemony of one's own view of the world.

Katherine P. Ewing

Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters wonderful

Eric S. Rabkin

The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

Joyce Carol Oates

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.

Toni Morrison

humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance.

Gad Saad

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.

Anthony M. Esolen

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

Sherry Turkle

Science is not a collection of facts. Nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. Science happens in the head. It's a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary perception. Columbus chapter -The Virgin and the Mousetrap

Chet Raymo

In the realm of love and sex, it’s girls who are in the position of working hard to adapt themselves to the needs and fantasies of the mercurial males whose approval and attention they seek.

Meenakshi Gigi Durham

Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

Hugh MacLennan

The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.

M. Thomas Gammarino

Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart.

Marina Budhos

Sometimes, you know, human kindness just knocks you off your feet.

Hollis Seamon

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Joyce Carol Oates

A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.

Larry Watson

If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.

Stephen R. Prothero

Each one of us needs to discover the proper balance between the masculine and feminine energies, between the active and the receptive. (104)

Ravi Ravindra

You need contradictions to make an ideal.

Alex Shakar

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

Alexander McCall Smith

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Maxine Hong Kingston

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.

Junot Díaz

But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people

Chris Abani

Getting there, that's what's important even if you can't get back.

Thomas O'Malley

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

David Leavitt

the Reagan years "produced one of the most dramatic redistributions of income in the nation's history....The income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent...while the income of those in the top one percent rose by 87.1 percent."Chain Reaction, 23

Thomas B. Edsall

In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life.

Kenneth McKenzie Wark

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

Toni Morrison

He was so far away now, or maybe he just looked distant because we were imaging different things for our future.

Alexandra Kleeman

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

Simon Baron-Cohen

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Richard M. Rorty

Of course there is such a thing as too much doubt, for we ought to accept what is true. But there is also such a thing as proper doubt, for we ought not accept what is false. The possibility of doubt is inherent in the longing to understand, and nothing less than complete and perfect knowledge can satisfy the mind. We do not possess such knowledge here on earth; it is reserved for the beatific vision. Until then, doubt will be with us. This is...why it is so unreasonable to trust only what cannot be doubted, as Descartes proposed, because everything can be doubted. We should believe, not what we cannot doubt, but what we have the best reasons to believe.

J. Budziszewski

Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.

Joyce Carol Oates

Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication

Jonathan Gottschall

I'm tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual.

Roxane Gay

There is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people, but I am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all.

Roxane Gay

Sometimes Yoel had the feeling that it was not his sexual organ but his whole being that was penetrating and luxuriating inside her womb. That he was entirety wrapped up and quivering inside her. Until with each caress the difference between caresser and caressed vanished, as though they had ceased being a man and a woman making love and had become one flesh.

Amos Oz

A good entrepreneur is a good teacher.

Edward D. Hess

Like honey is the sleep of the just.

Anne Carson

At its best, choice is a means by which we can resist the people and the systems that seek to exert control over us. But choice itself can become oppressive when we insist that it is equally available to all. It can become an excuse for ignoring inequities that stem from gender or class or ethnic differences, for example, because one can blithely say, “oh, but they had a choice! We all have choices.

Sheena Iyengar

People tend to romanticise consciousness, as if it’s something spiritual. It’s just a word we use to describe complexity.

David Walton

To respect the dignity of a relationship also implies accepting the end when it comes. Except in my mind, except in my dreams, where the aftertaste of her still lingers.

André Brink

Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and overlook the motive and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.

John Barth

Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not.

Nalo Hopkinson

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

Gregory Maguire

An unsolved problem bothers one's mind, just as a small stone in the shoe,until an idea for solving the problem comes to mind.

Eraldo Banovac

I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves

Rita Dove

Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.

Alexander McCall Smith

To continue what one had been doing -- which was Dante's idea of hell -- is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one's sixties.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Unfortunately, people who always tell the truth don't have many friends.

Eraldo Banovac

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

Roxane Gay

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.

Larry Watson

Let children wander aimlessly around ideas.

Sugata Mitra

I tried all kinds of approaches: sexy, friendly, intimidating—nothing worked. I’m starting to think there’s an invisible force field that prevents honest communication between X and Y chromosomes.

Jody Gehrman

Part of dealing with the sense of being cut off - for both the one dying and the one bereaved - is acknowledging that though a vital part of life has changed dramatically, all relationships (with friends, even with you, perhaps) have not.

Sandra L. Bertman

I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.

Roxanne Gay

Our vision of the heavenly realm...can sustain us through the most difficult of days and circumstances. It births hope amidst hardship and nurtures faith amidst opposition.

David Timms

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