Thought Provoking Quotes - Page 2

Much time is spent on meaning while precious little time wasted has none!

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

And I sat there at the patio,while the whole of universe,was getting engulfed,in the whitest whiteness of snow.Down, near my rough paw,is soft snow,mannering a fidgeting embryo.I monitored the snow that plunged,on the soil of my backyard,and realized it melting fast.Was that the temperature or,my eyes on it overcast?While I think of this melted exalt,I am obliged to ask,What ought happens to the thoughts?Where do they get tossed?When they are forgot?Scorched?Scoffed?Deformed? Unadorned?

GOD IS YOUR THOUGHTS

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

How many of us would ever explore the dark extremities of our own humanity were we not from time to time thrown into them involuntarily? 'Necessity is laid upon me,' wrote the apostle Paul; and mostly it is only of necessity, through the inescapability of life's misfortunes, and not in free discipleship or loving service, that we enter into solidarity with those who suffer and die, often in despair and hope. One there was who set his face toward Jerusalem, a shepherd who of his own accord laid down his life for sheep. For the rest of us, not as volunteers but conscripts, not in freedom but in the chains of accident or sickness, do we make our Easter Saturday graves with the wretched or the wicked.

It was like trying to think about what he’d be thinking if he never existed. He wouldn’t be thinking about what he was thinking. He just wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t hurt.

One of the main functions of a push-up bra is to lower the number of mothers who seem like mothers.

Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

Words are like people, I think. Put too many of them too close together and they cause trouble.

More often than not, an inspirational or motivational speaker is someone who makes money from telling us that we can do all of the things that we can do … and pretty much all of the things that we cannot do.

He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him.

Who knows if all our brains are inventing the same thing? I mean, how do we know that the thing YOUR eyes see and call "red" is the same thing that I call "red"?

Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

An idea weighs nothing, except on the mind.

My mentor used to say that no one can make us feel badly about ourselves unless we allow it. He lectured me endlessly that the biggest offenders to shrink our self-worth weren't others, but ourselves.

It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected...I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing...I still had the childish notion that since my life was so important, all lives were so important. Since my death would be so cataclysmic, all deaths would be so cataclysmic.

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.

It's ironic..here is life passing, like clouds drifting over the sky, yet they don't see what's in front of them. They believe there is something more substantial going on in that little screen in their hands.

Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.

And thereLike I thought I knewAnd aint life a bitchWas his head on a silver platter

Yet people are still showing up to lift their hands after all these years even though the church is flawed and broken and beautiful and has a shameful, ugly side to it that I'll bet it wishes it didn't have and repeatedly tries to hide.Just like me.Just like you.Just like always.

The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.

There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream

It's not about who loves her. It's about how you love her. You have to learn the difference between what she says, and what she means. Don't just make her laugh. Try and understand why she smiles. Plenty have told her she's beautiful, but can you make her feel that way too? There's a difference, see. Compliments might cage her, while empowerment sets her free. My God, what matters to her is not just who flatters her. There's a language to her love you'll need to learn. Speak it true, and I promise you, the best of her, is what you'll earn.

Accept who you are. Don’t leave me, Willow. We are all broken, that’s how the light shines through. - Rhydian

As we all know, as if forever exploiting or attempting to exploit each other were not enough, a group of sane human beings who have just reached the end of a war against a common enemy of theirs will sooner or later start or continue killing and/or fighting against each other.

Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.

In the land of the blind, a one eyed man is king

Our entire neurobiology acts as a giant input-output system, that receives information from the outside world, processes that information and makes a person react accordingly.