--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

lectureship ::: n. --> The office of a lecturer.

lectureship ::: n. --> The office of a lecturer.

--- QUOTES [5 / 5 - 500 / 508] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

KEYS (10k)

   2 Dr Robert A Hatch
   1 Lewis Carroll
   1 Jordan Peterson
   1 Editors of Discovery Magazine

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   12 Anonymous

   6 Albert Camus

   5 Swami Vivekananda

   5 F Scott Fitzgerald

   5 Aristotle

   4 Walt Whitman

   4 Walter Isaacson

   4 Stephen Fry

   4 Ryan Holiday

   4 Ralph Waldo Emerson
   4 Henry Rollins

   4 Hakim Sanai
   4 Eric Weiner

   4 Erich Fromm

   3 Sri Ramakrishna

   3 Scott Berkun

   3 Samuel Johnson

   3 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

   3 Lisa Kleypas

   3 Hermann Hesse

   3 Carol S Dweck

   3 Carl Sagan

   2 Vladimir Nabokov

   2 Ursula K Le Guin

   2 Thomas Jefferson

   2 Terry Pratchett

   2 Tara Westover

   2 Stephen Leacock

   2 Sarah Rees Brennan

   2 Salman Khan

   2 Rush Limbaugh

   2 Richelle Mead

   2 Richard Feynman
   2 R A Torrey

   2 Plutarch
   2 Paul Dirac
   2 Matt Ridley

   2 Mark Hopkins
   2 Lauren Willig

   2 John Galsworthy

   2 John Bellairs

   2 Joan Didion

   2 Hope Jahren

   2 Henry David Thoreau

   2 Helene Hanff

   2 Hans Rosling

   2 Gregory David Roberts

   2 Fyodor Dostoyevsky

   2 Farid ud-Din Attar
   2 Elizabeth J Church

   2 Eliezer Yudkowsky

   2 Edgar Lee Masters

   2 Dr Robert A Hatch
   2 Charles Darwin

   2 Carlo Rovelli

   2 Carl Jung
   2 Bren Brown

   2 Bill Gates

   2 Bertrand Russell

   2 Arthur Conan Doyle

   2 Anton Chekhov

   2 Anne Fadiman

   2 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

   2 Alejandro Jodorowsky

1:If they're on fire and you have water, then you can sell it to them. ~ Jordan Peterson, Personality Lectures ,

2:Weekly Reviews ::: Dedicate at least one afternoon or entire evening during the weekend to review all of your courses. Make certain you have an understanding of where each course is going and that your study schedule is appropriate. Do the 4x6 thing: One card for each chapter. Then ask yourself how each chapter relates to other chapters, and then, how the readings relate to each of the lectures. Are there contradictions? Differences of opinion, approach, method? What evidence is there to support the differences of opinion? What are your views? Can you defend them? A good exercise. ~ Dr Robert A Hatch, How to Study ,

3:5. When in Doubt ::: Read the Syllabus - Read Ahead - Ask Questions: Read the correlated readings (designed to mesh with that lecture) before you come to class. The whole point of correlated readings is to prepare you for the lecture. If the readings are completed at the appropriate time you will have a 'Big Picture' framed by a general narrative and suspended by an ongoing line of argument. These readings should help you establish a set of expectations as well as some unsettling questions. The lectures should help you connect ideas you have read about and, with any luck, they should help you call key issues into question. Your job is to arrive at an understanding you call your own and can defend to a critical audience. Beginning to end, you are the center of your education. You know where to begin. ~ Dr Robert A Hatch, How to Study ,

4:science reading list ::: 1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie 3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687) 4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632) 5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543) 6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.) 7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543) 8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916) 9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) 10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947) 11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (1968) 12. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger (1944) 13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973) 14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson (1971) 15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977) 16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) 17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981) 18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985) 19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814) 20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963) 21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948) 22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983) 23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943) 24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke (1665) 25. Gaia by James Lovelock (1979) ~ Editors of Discovery Magazine, Website.html">Website ,

5:One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, was drawn by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.The descriptions, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story.As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing --specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does', the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service.And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling --which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos': and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.It is, no doubt, possible to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,--if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,--that I could 'fulfil my task,' and produce my 'tale of bricks,' as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced--that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of 'padding' which might fitly be defined as 'that which all can write and none can read.' That the present volume contains no such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines : but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do.My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of 'padding' it contains. While arranging the 'slips' into pages, I found that the passage was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess which they are?A harder puzzle if a harder be desired would be to determine, as to the Gardener's Song, in which cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in which (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza.Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come's is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story--I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it--but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'--is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.Hence it is that, in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' I have striven with I know not what success to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written--which I should much like to attempt, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through--in the hope that, if I should fail (and the years are gliding away very fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.First, a Child's Bible. The only real essentials of this would be, carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love--no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great difficulty: no new ones would be needed : hundreds of excellent pictures already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size with a pretty attractive looking cover--in a clear legible type--and, above all, with abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible--not single texts, but passages of from 10 to 20 verses each--to be committed to memory. Such passages would be found useful, to repeat to one's self and to ponder over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible: for instance, when lying awake at night--on a railway-journey --when taking a solitary walk-in old age, when eyesight is failing or wholly lost--and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of David's rapturous cry "O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth!"I have said 'passages,' rather than single texts, because we have no means of recalling single texts: memory needs links, and here are none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen--and those by mere chance: whereas, once get hold of any portion of a chapter that has been committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages--enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.These two books of sacred, and secular, passages for memory--will serve other good purposes besides merely occupying vacant hours: they will help to keep at bay many anxious thoughts, worrying thoughts, uncharitable thoughts, unholy thoughts. Let me say this, in better words than my own, by copying a passage from that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX. "If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images, which will generally be at periodical hours, let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy, suicidal thoughts, beset him. Let these be to him the sword, turning everywhere to keep the way of the Garden of Life from the intrusion of profaner footsteps."Fourthly, a "Shakespeare" for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. Few children under 10 would be likely to understand or enjoy the greatest of poets: and those, who have passed out of girlhood, may safely be left to read Shakespeare, in any edition, 'expurgated' or not, that they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children, in the intermediate stage, should be debarred from a great pleasure for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated.' Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out! Besides relentlessly erasing all that is unsuitable on the score of reverence or decency, I should be inclined to omit also all that seems too difficult, or not likely to interest young readers. The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry.If it be needful to apologize to any one for the new departure I have taken in this story--by introducing, along with what will, I hope, prove to be acceptable nonsense for children, some of the graver thoughts of human life--it must be to one who has learned the Art of keeping such thoughts wholly at a distance in hours of mirth and careless ease. To him such a mixture will seem, no doubt, ill-judged and repulsive. And that such an Art exists I do not dispute: with youth, good health, and sufficient money, it seems quite possible to lead, for years together, a life of unmixed gaiety--with the exception of one solemn fact, with which we are liable to be confronted at any moment, even in the midst of the most brilliant company or the most sparkling entertainment. A man may fix his own times for admitting serious thought, for attending public worship, for prayer, for reading the Bible: all such matters he can defer to that 'convenient season', which is so apt never to occur at all: but he cannot defer, for one single moment, the necessity of attending to a message, which may come before he has finished reading this page,' this night shalt thy soul be required of thee.'The ever-present sense of this grim possibility has been, in all ages, 1 an incubus that men have striven to shake off. Few more interesting subjects of enquiry could be found, by a student of history, than the various weapons that have been used against this shadowy foe. Saddest of all must have been the thoughts of those who saw indeed an existence beyond the grave, but an existence far more terrible than annihilation--an existence as filmy, impalpable, all but invisible spectres, drifting about, through endless ages, in a world of shadows, with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to love! In the midst of the gay verses of that genial 'bon vivant' Horace, there stands one dreary word whose utter sadness goes to one's heart. It is the word 'exilium' in the well-known passageOmnes eodem cogimur, omniumVersatur urna serius ociusSors exitura et nos in aeternumExilium impositura cymbae.Yes, to him this present life--spite of all its weariness and all its sorrow--was the only life worth having: all else was 'exile'! Does it not seem almost incredible that one, holding such a creed, should ever have smiled?And many in this day, I fear, even though believing in an existence beyond the grave far more real than Horace ever dreamed of, yet regard it as a sort of 'exile' from all the joys of life, and so adopt Horace's theory, and say 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'We go to entertainments, such as the theatre--I say 'we', for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one and keep at arm's length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know--dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface that it may not be your lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis--to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you to hear their troubled whispers perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, "Is it serious?", and to be told "Yes: the end is near" (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)--how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself "Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too 'risky', the dialogue a little too strong, the 'business' a little too suggestive.I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow." To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vainUpon the axis of its pain,Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for 'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger.But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine 'Sport': I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some 'man-eating' tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those 'tender and delicate' beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love--'thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'--whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!'Farewell, farewell! but this I tellTo thee, thou Wedding-Guest!He prayeth well, who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast.He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno ,

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:The lectures you deliver ~ Edgar Guest

2:Wounds make better lessons than lectures. ~ Brian Herbert

3:Swami Vivekananda LECTURES ON THE BHAGAVAD GITA ~ Swami Vivekananda

4:John L. Stoddard’s Lectures VOL. IX Scotland England ~ John Bellairs

5:John L. Stoddard’s Lectures VOL. IX Scotland England London ~ John Bellairs

6:I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself. ~ Stephen Cope

7:Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself. ~ Walt Whitman

8:Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give I give myself. ~ Walt Whitman

9:I prefer to hike in nature, give lectures, or be with family when not working. ~ Robert Bateman

10:What is the use of merely listening to lectures? The real thing is practice. ~ Sri Ramakrishna

11:I attended [Sir Humphry] Davy's lectures to renew my stock of metaphors. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

12:Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars. ~ Stephen Fry

13:I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures. ~ Sigmund Freud

14:Information, consequences, choice. Without lectures or micro-management or rescue. ~ Gretchen Rubin

15:The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. ~ Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures.

16:I give lectures for money, but all the money goes to charity. So, I make no money from it. ~ Bob Woodward

17:Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

18:You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

19:I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

20:he delivered a series of lectures that became books, which forever changed the way we look at ~ Wayne W Dyer

21:If they're on fire and you have water, then you can sell it to them. ~ Jordan Peterson, Personality Lectures,

22:Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts. ~ Bill Gates

23:Lectures, says Minerva’s Stephen Kosslyn, are ‘a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn’. ~ Matt Ridley

24:Events sometimes are the biggest teachers, as opposed to words, lectures, and that kind of thing. ~ Rush Limbaugh

25:We need to have lectures about why we can't have every day things like mayonnaise, ketchup and Coke. ~ Paolo Di Canio

26:Live events and lectures in front of large audiences. It is the best. I like it more than eating dinner. ~ David Wolfe

27:Oh, that Einstein, always skipping lectures... I certainly never would have thought he could do it. ~ Hermann Minkowski

28:Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach. ~ Michael Faraday

29:A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly. ~ Leopold von Sacher Masoch

30:I, for instance, gave lectures in which I denounced the capitalists and defended blacks in America. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

31:In 1948 I was appointed to a Lectureship in Physics and in 1949 elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College. ~ Martin Ryle

32:Don't be surprised if in the 21st century lectures on meditation appear in university catalogues for physics. ~ Gary Zukav

33:After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility. ~ Ben Shapiro

34:Lectures were once useful; but now when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary. ~ Samuel Johnson

35:My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside. ~ Aristotle

36:Kindness and love can buy you the whole world; lectures and books and philosophy all stand lower than these. ~ Swami Vivekananda

37:As a heart surgeon I am on constant call, and when not researching or giving lectures, I like to be with my family. ~ Magdi Yacoub

38:What little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan. For ~ Augusten Burroughs

39:The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners. ~ Albert Camus

40:The golf ball has no sense at all, which is why it has to be given stern lectures constantly, especially during the act of putting. ~ Dan Jenkins

41:You may think that I have told you everything already, because in the lectures I have told you all the great principles that are known. ~ Anonymous

42:The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry. ~ Charles Darwin

43:To question, to ponder, and to learn. Education was my drug of choice—classrooms, books, lectures, pushing myself to understand. ~ Elizabeth J Church

44:If the Royal Variety Show was put in a matter transportation machine with the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, this is what you'd get. ~ Robin Ince

45:Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university. ~ Bill Gates

46:I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds. ~ Ehud Barak

47:I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

48:Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all. ~ Stephen Leacock

49:Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn. ~ Leo Tolstoy

50:Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction. ~ Jane Jacobs

51:If you're going to sleep through lectures and skip the readings, it's rude to do it from the front row. I'm at least a thoughtful reprobate. ~ Elizabeth Fama

52:Tad and Alison, according to the itinerary, would be giving lectures on Cuban culture, time and place TBA, which I think means To Be Avoided. ~ Nelson DeMille

53:Ray's voice echoes in my head from one of his many self-defense lectures. "It's the panic that's gonna kill you or get you seriously hurt, Annie. ~ E L James

54:Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Education", Lectures and biographical sketches (1883), p.116

55:I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. ~ H L Mencken

56:I get up and retire when I wish. I go out if I wish and I do not go out if I do not desire to do so, except for the two days on which I give lectures. ~ Pierre Bayle

57:This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. ~ V S Naipaul

58:I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him. —Salman Khan ~ Salman Khan

59:work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man's dignity. - Emil Brunner, Gifford Lectures, 1948 ~ Larry Niven

60:[I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures - Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Huxley, and Shaw being my favorite speakers. ~ Raymond Cattell

61:We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

62:Even though I had a good income from my lectures, no one would give me a loan. The insanity almost drove me to sympathize with the feminist movement. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

63:Wow. Why don’t you start with authority? Authority of what?’’ ‘‘Magic.’’ ‘‘Really. Magic experts? Are there magic lectures? Magic bake sales? Magic bingo night? ~ Devon Monk

64:You're not going to wither up and die from this, Addy," Ashton lectures me as she shoves me toward the shower. "He doesn't get to erase you from the world. ~ Karen M McManus

65:His skin felt so war, and I wondered that in all her lectures upon proper behaviour, Anna had failed to mention that behaving improperly was much more fun. ~ Natasha Solomons

66:Meanwhile, find new friends who are also involved in healthful approaches to life by frequenting health-food stores and restaurants or by attending lectures. ~ John A McDougall

67:Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity. ~ Horace Mann, Lectures and Reports on Education, Lecture 1.

68:I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience. ~ Stanislav Grof

69:The lectures began early in the morning, finished at dusk, in the cold, comfortless, straw-strewn rooms. The stuff of the lectures, the Quadrivium and the Trivium, seems ~ C P Snow

70:If all the students who slept through lectures were laid end to end, they'd all be a lot more comfortable. If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door. ~ Paul Beatty

71:It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide. ~ Daniel Coit Gilman

72:Lectures in hermeneutics—the science of interpretation—have their place. But this is not it. God has spoken in order to be understood by ordinary people such as ourselves. ~ Anonymous

73:One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I'd have done even worse if they'd been on a laptop screen. ~ Gail Collins

74:Realisation is real religion, all the rest is only preparation — hearing lectures, or reading books, or reasoning is merely preparing the ground; it is not religion. ~ Swami Vivekananda

75:From good people you’ll learn good, but if you mingle with the bad you’ll destroy such soul as you had.” —MUSONIUS RUFUS, QUOTING THEOGNIS OF MEGARA, LECTURES, 11.53.21–22 ~ Ryan Holiday

76:Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. ~ Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915 - 1917)

77:I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets. ~ Paul Samuelson

78:Science lectures dealt with social problems that still could be solved, not defunct political systems for which both the proponents and the opponents had died before my birth. ~ Hope Jahren

79:The Killing Fields, my character's teachings frame the movie and the argument of his lectures is the challenge of dealing with the painfulness of life in the absence of faith. ~ Sam Waterston

80:A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures. ~ George Bernard Shaw

81:No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose. ~ Scott Berkun

82:Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom. ~ Jonathan Sacks

83:The infidelity that springs from the heart is not to be reached by a course of lectures on the evidences of Christianity; argument did not cause, and argument will not remove it. ~ Mark Hopkins

84:The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state. ~ Adolf Hitler

85:There are great science books that were conceived as books. Feynman's famous introductory lectures in physics, which have a beginning and an end, which are written with style. ~ David Gelernter

86:Hence anyone who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. ~ Aristotle

87:Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. ~ Carl Jung, Lectures on Nietzsche's Zarasthustra

88:Nancy Pelosi lectures about the nobility of illegal immigrants, but stays away from the overcrowded emergency room, public schools for her own grandchildren, and mixed neighborhoods. ~ Anonymous

89:All the sutras in the world are useless. All the lectures of all the teachers don't really mean anything. They are only words. They point in a direction, that is their only use. ~ Frederick Lenz

90:During your job search, you must also be networking as much as possible, attending events, talks, lectures, and conferences where you’ll meet people you can add to your contact list. ~ Kate White

91:You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. ~ Virginia Woolf

92:This is what Descartes meant when he said: 'I know God before I know myself.'  The only mark of God in us is that we feel that we are not God. ~ Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 90

93:chaos of the first few weeks unravelled into order and routine and we began to get the hang of things. The mornings were mostly devoted to lectures on temporal dynamics, pod procedures ~ Jodi Taylor

94:We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering. ~ Artur Davis

95:Mother never delivered lectures or administered exams. She never assigned essays. There was a computer in the basement with a program called Mavis Beacon, which gave lessons on typing. ~ Tara Westover

96:The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent—if necessary by force—all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen.”19 ~ William L Shirer

97:I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. ~ Dylan Thomas

98:To theology, … only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), Lecture 2, p. 11.

99:You have had enough of lectures, arguments, quarrels,discussions, and dissensions. Can such things interest you any more? Now gather your whole mind and direct it to God. Plunge deep into God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna

100:Let a man be firmly principled in his religion, he may travel from the tropics to the poles, it will never catch cold on the journey. ~ William Morley Punshon, Lectures and Sermons (1877) "Daniel in Babylon" p. 8

101:The modern school without systematic lectures turns out many graduates who lack retention. No sooner has the sound of the word left their teacher's lips, the subject has been forgotten. ~ Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

102:While I regard the Nakba as an ongoing crime that needs to be prosecuted and reversed...Shavit defends its necessity and lectures Palestinians trapped in squalid refugee camps to just get over it. ~ Max Blumenthal

103:Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell. ~ Lewis Mumford

104:People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. ~ Samuel Johnson

105:Shocked, the teacher rushed out and brought back the headmistress. Throughout the rest of the period, both of them tried to figure out who set off the bomb and gave us lectures on our rowdy behaviour. ~ Chetan Bhagat

106:When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments. ~ Philip Emeagwali

107:I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. ~ Henry Rollins

108:I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people. ~ Peter Carey

109:He took with him a bag in which were many instruments and drugs, 'the ghastly paraphernalia of our beneficial trade', as he once called, in one of his lectures, the equipment of a professor of the healing craft. ~ Bram Stoker

110:I am not addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back. ~ Carl Jung, Terry Lectures

111:I’m not looking to fail you. I don’t teach with the hope everyone will play games on their phone during lectures and then skate by with Cs.” “If you did, you’d probably be much happier.” “I’m going to ignore that. ~ Dahlia Adler

112:I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. ~ Henry Rollins

113:the classroom as a living, breathing place. They chose discussions over lectures, experience over theory. They sent students to the Deep South for civil rights projects and to the inner city for fieldwork. They went ~ Mitch Albom

114:11 Jerome Bruner Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture (1990) A founder of cognitive psychology argues for a model of the mind based on the creation of meaning rather than computational processing. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon

115:And suddenly I am blindingly angry at Raven--for her lectures, and her stubbornness, and for thinking that the way that you help people is by driving them against a wall, by beating them down until they fight back. ~ Lauren Oliver

116:A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence. ~ Shirley Hazzard

117:Instructions for Adam Look after no one except yourself. Go to university and make lots of friends and get drunk. Forget your door keyes. Laugh. Eat pot-noodles for breakfast. Miss lectures. Be irresponsible. ~ Jenny Downham

118:in the spring he will attend your botanical course. his natural turn is very strongly to the objects of your two courses of lectures, and I hope you will have reason to be contended with his capacity & character. ~ Thomas Jefferson

119:This Saturday? As in tomorrow Saturday? We have to give lectures in twelve hours? We're not prepared for that! I can't just pull a cyber-crimes lecture out of my ass!" He could, but it was the principle of the thing. ~ Abigail Roux

120:When I got to Princeton I made a point of attending the Philosophy Club and listening to the lectures, but I didn't get involved in any discussions in those clubs. I guess after the first year, I dropped that. ~ Stephen Cole Kleene

121:Albert [Einstein] was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made. ~ Carlo Rovelli

122:It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 more of my lectures before it finally announced publicly that it was dropping the terms “developing” and “developed” and would from now on divide the world into four income groups. ~ Hans Rosling

123:In 1933, one student said, “Among the public, there spread the expectation that the salvation of the German people would now come from Hitler. But in the lectures we were told that salvation comes only from Jesus Christ. ~ Eric Metaxas

124:The greatest lessons I learned from my father didn't come from lectures or discipline or even time spent together. What has stuck with me is his example. From watching, I chose whether to be or not to be like him. ~ Richelle E Goodrich

125:Within those confining walls, teachers - a bunch of men all armed with the same information - gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes. ~ Yukio Mishima

126:Indeed, how could exile be an obstacle to a person’s own cultivation, or to attaining virtue when no one has ever been cut off from learning or practicing what is needed by exile?” —MUSONIUS RUFUS, LECTURES, 9.37.30–31, 9.39.1 ~ Ryan Holiday

127:I think it would be good to be pregnant in all those lectures. They say you should play Mozart to babies in the womb to make kids more intelligent. Imagine what lectures on game theory might do. We’re going to raise a superhero. ~ Louise Bay

128:The Puranas, the Tantras, and all the other books, even the Vyasa Sutras, are of secondary, or tertiary authority, but primary are the Vedas. ~ Abhedānanda (Swami), in Vedanta philosophy: five lectures on reincarnation Abhedānanda (Swami), p. 294

129:The sum and substance of the preparation needed for a coming eternity is that you believe what the Bible tells you, and do what the Bible bids you. ~ Thomas Chalmers, Lectures on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans vol. 1 (1837) pp. 29-30

130:To have thought that, with the right tests and the right lectures, I could be made into a cold-blooded, heartless killer. To have thought that I could ignore the beating of my own heart long enough to stop the beating of another's. ~ Jessica Khoury

131:We have been given a role to play. We have been asked to provide, to give lectures on the role of Islamic development and the way we do it here, so the people who are Muslims there would understand what the role of Islam is. ~ Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

132:That's the one hobby of you people - giving lectures and bringing others to the light! Nobody ever stops to consider how to get the light himself. Who are you to teach others? He who is the Lord of the Universe will teach everyone. ~ Sri Ramakrishna

133:Colonialism was also justified by an elaborate ideology, embodied in everything from Kipling’s poetry and Stanley’s lectures to sermons and books about the shapes of skulls, lazy natives, and the genius of European civilization. And ~ Adam Hochschild

134:Last year I gave several lectures on "Intelligence and Musicality among Animals" ... Today I am going to speak to you about "Intelligence and Musicality among Critics" ... The subject is much the same, with some modifications, of course. ~ Erik Satie

135:I knew the statistics; I’d attended the police lectures. Never get in the car. Never, never, never. Kick, scream, punch, squirm, spit, claw—do whatever it takes, but don’t get in that vehicle. A woman’s chances of survival plummeted. ~ James Grippando

136:One unfortunate Greek ambassador at about the same time is known to have fallen into an open Roman sewer and broken his leg – and made the most of his convalescence by giving introductory lectures on literary theory to a curious audience. ~ Mary Beard

137:Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked. ~ George Orwell

138:Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883) "Character".

139:Distant singing is heard. Ghostly voices become audible: fragments of lectures remembered, the finely distilled wisdom and passion of seers and poets with which the modern young mind is tempered for the world that blows it to pieces. ~ Tennessee Williams

140:Where once September seemed merely and quietly odd, staring out the window during Mathematics lectures and reading big colorful books under her desk during Civics, now the other children sensed something wild and foreign about her. ~ Catherynne M Valente

141:I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did. ~ John McCain

142:My mom never gave me an inch. Anytime I got in trouble it was tough love, lectures, punishment, and hidings. Every time. For every infraction. You get that with a lot of black parents. They’re trying to discipline you before the system does. ~ Trevor Noah

143:During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology. ~ Charles Darwin

144:I like what I'm doing. Today at 88, I wouldn't think of quitting because I can't think of anything else I would rather do. And now with my lectures on all the charitable things that I do, just as you do, I think that what I'm doing matters ~ Art Linkletter

145:I work with a place in Santa Monica called Phase IV. My doctor recommended them to me when I started losing weight. They help people train for things like triathlons or biking and running races. They offer physical therapists, testing, lectures. ~ Drew Carey

146:It's such a measure of your solidarity with Ed, that when you would give lectures, he would be wearing a tartan tie that matched. And I demanded that outfit, I thought it was so punk - her long skirt, she looked like a Scottish queen, so regal. ~ Vera Farmiga

147:I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss

148:To question, to ponder, to ask, and to learn. Education was my drug of choice—classrooms, books, lectures, pushing myself to understand. Forever trying to win my father’s approval, never quite grasping the fact that a dead man cannot applaud. ~ Elizabeth J Church

149:In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit. ~ Charlie Chaplin

150:In college, I was always disappointed by lectures that covered social problems but failed to identify what I could do to change them. Part of the problem was that many professors simply didn't believe they had a role in converting awareness to action. ~ Ben Rattray

151:Hilbert once had a student in mathematics who stopped coming to his lectures, and he was finally told the young man had gone off to become a poet. Hilbert is reported to have remarked: 'I never thought he had enough imagination to be a mathematician.' ~ George Polya

152:He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. —SIGMUND FREUD, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis ~ Alex Michaelides

153:There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board. ~ A S Byatt

154:Murdoch was now in great academic and public demand. Despite having been diagnosed as partially deaf with Ménière’s disease, an incurable affliction of the inner ear, she gave many lectures and interviews, as well as visiting Yale University in October 1959. ~ Iris Murdoch

155:But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings. ~ Galileo Galilei

156:A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century. ~ Carlo Rovelli

157:Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures. ~ Ian McEwan

158:In his life, he'd had more than his share of lectures, some brutal enough to leave permanent gouges in his soul. But no man had ever spoken to him quite like this- wry, honest, direct, bracing, and a bit high-handed in a way that felt oddly reassuring. Fatherly. ~ Lisa Kleypas

159:Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time…the parties…” "What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the ‘library’?” “Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied. ~ E A Bucchianeri

160:Fanaticism is the opposite of love,' I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. 'A wise man once told me--he's a Muslim, by the way--that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. ~ Gregory David Roberts

161:For Northerners, victory had confirmed they were on God’s side, fortifying their besetting smugness, and their religion resolved more and more into a pretty, reassuring background hum. Going to church meant sitting quietly and listening to lectures about virtue. ~ Kurt Andersen

162:I had many wonderful experiences, received beautiful letters, and my Christian books received substantive and thoughtful reviews. But there was always argument, dispute, questions as to what I "really" believed, lectures from here and there on "the real truth," etc. ~ Anne Rice

163:Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. ~ Joan Didion

164:The ministerial students were the worst—they were maybe one-third to one-half of each class, and this was their trade school. They came to learn the right words, all the proper formulae ... which they wrote down and memorized from the lectures of their profs. ~ Richard Ben Cramer

165:In private, with pencil on scratch paper, he labored over aphorisms that he later delivered in spontaneous-seeming lectures: Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. ~ James Gleick

166:These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow. ~ Hermann Hesse

167:My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances. ~ Terence McKenna

168:When a nominee for the Supreme Court, one of only nine lifetime appointments, makes an overtly brazen racist comment about tens of millions of American citizens, we don't need lectures. What we need to do is to confront her with what she said and what it says about her. ~ Rush Limbaugh

169:Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race. ~ Mark Hopkins, Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846) Lecture II, p. 49

170:Philosophy gets on my nerves. If we analyze the ultimate ground of everything, then everything finally falls into nothingness. But I have decided to resume my lectures again and look the Hydra of doubt straight into the eye, and it be quite ominous if one values one's life. ~ Ludwig Boltzmann

171:I have lectured at the U.N. and travelled widely, giving lectures on human rights and gender inequalities in universities. But this is a life I do not wish to live. I don't want to be a showcase, I want to be in a battlefield where I can stand beside the oppressed and the poor. ~ Taslima Nasrin

172:If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to. ~ Richard Dawkins

173:We learned in class, were lectured to about wars and famines, ancient kings and queens, the habits of presidents. But the lectures were cursory. We needed to know what happened, because we were the well-bred daughters of men who could afford to educate us--but not why, or how. ~ Anton DiSclafani

174:Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. ~ Bell Hooks

175:After I give lectures-on almost any subject-I am often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?" ~ Carl Sagan

176:One of the first lectures my history professor gave us was about this guy William Morris. He said that everything you own should be either useful or beautiful. It’s a lot to aspire to, but I figured why not try? I saw these in a potter’s studio a couple days afterward and I bought them. ~ Nina LaCour

177:Most kids might not think that riding the bus to school is all that awesomesauce, but that's only until your mom makes you go with her every morning and then lectures you about not using your magical powers the whole way to school and then picks you up and lectures you the whole way home. ~ Wendy Mass

178:After I give lectures—on almost any subject—I often am asked, “Do you believe in UFOs?” I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, “How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?” I ~ Carl Sagan

179:After the lectures at the university he used to argue this point with a young Rumanian intellectual who reassured him: “There’s no evidence that Goethe ever had a ‘conflict’ in the modern sense, or a man like Jung, for instance. You’re not a romantic philosopher—you’re a scientist. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

180:Vidich, Paul, 363–4, 366, 367 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 117 Vietnam War, 31 “View from the Top” lectures, 245 Vincent, James, xv, 306, 335, 360, 361, 366, 381, 385, 389–90, 459–61, 480, 481, 483 Visa, 378 VisiCalc (finance program), 77 VLSI Technology, 331 “Wade in the Water” (song), ~ Walter Isaacson

181:Man or woman, I might tell you how I like you, but cannot, And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot, And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days. Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give, I give myself. ~ Walt Whitman

182:I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly. ~ Henry David Thoreau

183:I was completely surrounded by religion from a young time. I was taught by my father. I engaged in discussions with him and many of these scholars who visited and came around the dining table, the lunch table, and attended many lectures with my dad. And so I learned the apprentice way. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf

184:She felt no relief at having survived this attack. No heady satisfaction surged through her because she’d made it to shore. She felt only a growing emptiness. A gathering dark. For this was her life now. Not boredom and lectures, but hell-flames and assassins. Massacres and endless flight. ~ Susan Dennard

185:Han struggled to remember Master Leontus's lectures on healing, the recitations he'd drowsed through. I'll never have need of that, Han had thought. I'm being trained to kill people, not heal them. He'd thought everyone he'd ever want to heal was already dead. He'd been wrong. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

186:How sweet is that? I know I'm no boy expert, but I have heard entire lectures on reading body language, and I have to say that assuming that a person will have forgotten your name is way high on my "indicators of humbleness" list (not that I have one, but I totally have a starting point now). ~ Ally Carter

187:Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces. ~ John Ruskin

188:But it is possible that a completely different author is somewhere writing a book about a UN Major Albert Knag, who is writing a book for his daughter Hilde. This book is about a certain Alberto Knox who suddenly begins to send humble philosophical lectures to Sophie Amundsen, 3 Clover Close. ~ Jostein Gaarder

189:The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted ~ Richard Holmes

190:The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

191:A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom. Only those who understand the profound paradox of the cross can also understand the whole meaning of Jesus’ assertion: my kingdom is not of this world. 2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Lectures to the Congregation in Barcelona ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

192:Well in two months, it'd be sunbathing time. That made me smile. I enjoyed lying in the sun in a little bikini, timing myself carefully so I didn't burn. I loved the smell of coconut oil. And I don't want to hear any lectures about how bad tanning is for you. That's my vice. Everybody gets one. ~ Charlaine Harris

193:any beginning student of Śaiva Tantra must become acquainted with Sanderson’s work, beginning with the easier introductory pieces: “Shaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” “Power and Purity among the Brahmins of Kashmir,” and “EPHE Lectures: Long Summary,” all available on alexissanderson.com. ~ Christopher D Wallis

194:Man thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 92

195:The care of a house, the conduct of a home, the management of children, the instruction and government of servants, are as deserving of scientific treatment and scientific professors and lectureships as are the care of farms, the management of manure and crops, and the raising and care of stock. ~ Catharine Beecher

196:If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

197:We will never understand Christ, nor see His glory, until the Holy Spirit interprets Him to us. The mere listening to sermons and lectures, the mere study of the word even, will never give you to see the things of Christ. The Holy Spirit must show you, and He is willing to do it. He is longing to do it. ~ R A Torrey

198:As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible. ~ Philip Kitcher

199:I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” They were studying to learn, not just to ace the test. And, actually, this was why they got higher grades—not because they were smarter or had a better background in science. ~ Carol S Dweck

200:Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs. ~ Stephen Leacock

201:That’s what happens when you insist on going around wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle,” she remarked. “When you start dating a girl, parents are going to have strong words. Deliver lectures. Set curfews. Hurl projectiles.” Jared shrugged. “About how I always expected it would go, yeah. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

202:The Society or Fraternity of Freemasons is more in the nature of a system of Philosophy or of moral and social virtues taught by symbols, allegories, and lectures based upon fundamental truths, the observance of which tends to promote stability of character, conservatism, morality and good citizenship. ~ William Howard Taft

203:What makes me the happiest are the times I get together with my family, those times when I am with my children, grandchildren, my brothers and sisters and my very close friends, as well as when I am with my extended family in each one of my lectures and power journeys. My greatest joy is just to be alive! ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

204:Beyond thy lectures learn’d professor, Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics ... The entities of entities, eidólons. Unfix’d yet fix’d, Ever shall be, ever have been and are, Sweeping the present to the infinite future, Eidólons, eidólons, eidólons. ~ Walt Whitman

205:Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature (1980), saw it all: Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him. ~ Stanislas Dehaene

206:Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence ~ V S Ramachandran

207:Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays. ~ Stephen Fry

208:lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays… ~ Stephen Fry

209:My mother lives in Moscow, and I would like to visit her. Now she always has to travel to Finland or a Baltic country to meet me. But I have to expect that my papers would be confiscated in Moscow immediately, and that they would harass my family. I can still have more impact in the West with my books and lectures. ~ Garry Kasparov

210:Prayer and humility, along with a hatred for sin, produces a ‘mind to work.’ ‘So built we the wall; and all the wall was joined together unto the half thereof: for the people had a mind to work’ (Nehemiah 4:6). True revivals of holiness always produce workers. Books and seminars and lectures don’t—but revival does! ~ David Wilkerson

211:By the time they're in college, it's gone too far. They've had twelve years without disciplined learning and they don't know how to apply themselves. They haven't learned to study or to pace their work so that projects get completed on time. They fall asleep in lectures because they expect to be entertained not educated. ~ Lois Duncan

212:Perhaps Phillips Brooks was consciously echoing Henry Ward Beecher, who gave the first Yale lectures in 1872 in memory of his father. “A preacher,” he said, “is, in some degree, a reproduction of the truth in personal form. The truth must exist in him as a living experience, a glorious enthusiasm, an intense reality.”7 ~ John R W Stott

213:At the behest of Princeton's President, all of Einstein's lectures were very technical. They included more than one hundred and twenty-five complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, "I sat in the balcony but he talked right over my head anyway. ~ Walter Isaacson

214:Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence ~ Vilayanur S Ramachandran

215:the truth and value of a theory does not depend on the number of people who are interested in it - otherwise you might compare the number of people who follow the predictions of astrologers in the daily press with those who attend lectures by Einstein, and conclude that astrology was more valuable and true than physics. ~ Dorothy L Sayers

216:Uh, what are you doing?” “Nothing much. Just erasing all of Calinda’s good grades and replacing them with incompletes. Eventually, the administrators will figure out what happened, but I’m making it look like a computer error. Still, I imagine she’ll get some nasty lectures from her profs and parents in the meantime. ~ Jennifer Estep

217:During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American. ~ Anne Fadiman

218:Was I lazy? Had I not applied for situations, attended lectures, written articles, and worked day and night like a man possessed? Had I not lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I had plenty, bread alone when I had little, and starved when I had nothing? Did I live in an hotel? Had I a suite of rooms on the first floor? ~ Knut Hamsun

219:I don't see myself as a movie maker only. When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live. I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

220:For official record, announce instructor, the state requires no epic hero. No strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause. Lectures instructor, the state desires best ideal perform as mediocre. No gain attention showboat. No buffoon. Best effort so occur average. Suppress climbing ego. Become ordinary. Invisible. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

221:Calwyn felt suddenly very solemn and serious. Usually during lessons and lectures she felt only a fierce desire to be elsewhere or an irresistible urge to fidget, but now she sat as still as a statue, sensing that what Marna was about to tell her was more important, and certainly more interesting, than herb lore or weaving patterns. ~ Kate Constable

222:His lectures were always well attended, and not just because he imparted so much wisdom and knowledge: he also managed to do it with humour. It had taken Danny some time to realize that the professor enjoyed provoking discussion and argument by offering up outrageous statements to see what reaction he would arouse from his students. ~ Jeffrey Archer

223:But indeed an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland man; one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love. I have heard him read many lectures against it; and I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offenses as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal. ~ William Shakespeare

224:Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean. ~ Robertson Davies

225:if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor’s prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet—Babette’s feast—spread for me. ~ Philip Yancey

226:In his lectures to young communists in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. ~ Anonymous

227:The Pistons were partly distracted by this short but excitingly fiery chase, and partly distracted by a new threat in the form of a small but enraged Dimity. Dimity, bless her heart, was reciting one of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s longest lectures on proper behavior at a dance, finger shaking in autocratic fury, Lord Dingleproops notwithstanding. ~ Gail Carriger

228:While the business of education in Europe consists in lectures upon the ruins of Palmyra and the antiquities of Herculaneum , or in disputes about Hebrew points, Greek particles, or the accent and quantity of the Roman language, the youth of America will be employed in acquiring those branches of knowledge which increase the conveniences of life. ~ Benjamin Rush

229:When the claims of God are revealed to the mind, it must necessarily yield to them, or strengthen itself in sin. It must, as it were, gird itself up, and struggle to resist the claims of duty. This strengthening self in sin under light is the particular form of sin which we call impenitence. ~ Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Systematic Theology (1878), p. 369

230:Lectures IV and V - The Religion Of Healthy Mindedness If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. ~ William James

231:I do not find that the age or country makes the least difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion which they professed whether Arab in the desert or Frenchman in the Academy, I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883), The Preacher, p. 215

232:De-programming the perfunctory ways of meat, dairy, egg and honey-eaters is possible. Conservatively speaking, my lectures have converted hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, while hundreds of thousands more have significantly reduced their meat, cheese, milk, honey and egg intake. Abolition and reduction are the only proper ways to end a Holocaust. ~ Gary Yourofsky

233:I dreamed of going to the most remote places on this earth to dig for old bones, older than people. Before humans and their stupid ideas. Before hate. Maybe even before love, too. Dinosaurs just existed. No lectures, no books, no language. No world-conquering Europeans and no defeated everybody else. Just those powerful, unrestrained creatures roaming the planet. ~ Ibi Zoboi

234:We need to develop a robust set of tools - strategies and routines - that help us address student variance. It's easy to come to rely on two or three "trusty" instructional strategies like worksheets and lectures. Those are of little help in planning for a variety of student needs. As we develop a better toolbox, we're empowered to meet students where they are. ~ Carol Ann Tomlinson

235:The more we talk about the epidemic as an individual disease phenomenon or a moral failing, the easier it is to obfuscate and ignore the social and economic conditions that predispose certain individuals to addiction. The fix isn't more Suboxone or lectures on morality but rather a reinvigorated democracy that provides a pathway for meaningful work, with a living wage, for everybody. ~ Beth Macy

236:(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors. ~ Stefan Zweig

237:Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can. This does not mean aping extroverts; ideas can be shared quietly, they can be communicated in writing, they can be packaged into highly produced lectures, they can be advanced by allies. The trick for introverts is to honor their own styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms. ~ Susan Cain

238:People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures! ~ Samuel Johnson

239:Instead of plunging into unthinking memorization of the course material, they said: “I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” They were studying to learn, not just to ace the test. And, actually, this was why they got higher grades—not because they were smarter or had a better background in science. ~ Carol S Dweck

240:As long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a teacher, but a turning point for me was attending HBS as an MBA student. What I experienced was the power of the case method - that is, how much students can learn, not by listening to lectures, but by engaging in an intense discussion. This can be an exciting way to learn and a powerful one, because it really gets all the synapses to connect. ~ Joseph Badaracco

241:I actually went on lectures at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and all the business schools eight years ago, explaining what the implications were and how the platforms could be powerful in creating the narrative of your brand and mobilizing your life so that you become humanized as well. I understood that and thought that was really empowering, not only to artists, but to brands as well and in general. ~ MC Hammer

242:Culture has to be constantly on the vanguard, too. It should be educating people, as it does in Latin America: thousands of great theatres, art cinemas, millions of free books distributed by the governments, public poetry readings, free public lectures, and all sorts of bookstores are open until early mornings, exhibitions reacting to the needs and sorrows of society, concerts of engaged music. ~ Andre Vltchek

243:With Cosmos, Sagan sought to counter the fear and distrust of applied science, and to inspire the kind of basic science wonder that Hubble’s lectures and the moon landing once had. The series was enormously successful. For the first time since Hubble, a huge audience was engaged in exploring the grand questions about life, nature, the structure of the universe, and what it might all mean. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto

244:I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best. ~ Maxine Kumin

245:I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. ~ John Muir

246:Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition. ~ Thomas Hardy

247:The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology. Why pay huge fees to spend three years on one campus, earning the right to be paid not very much more in the real world than non-graduates, rather than putting together your own combination of online courses, marked and graded online, using the lectures of the best teachers in the field wherever they happen to be? ~ Matt Ridley

248:The world around us is an increasingly hostile and sinful place. Occasionally that splashes onto us, and perhaps, in the case of a few of you, it may be nearly drowning you. To anyone struggling under the burden of sin, I say again with the Prophet Joseph that God has ‘a forgiving disposition’ (Lectures on Faith, 42). You can change. You can be helped. You can be made whole—whatever the problem. ~ Jeffrey R Holland

249:True religion is not talk, or doctrines, or theories, nor is it sectarianism. It is the relation between soul and God. Religion does not consist in erecting temples, or building churches, or attending public worship. It is not to be found in books, or in words, or in lectures, or in organizations. Religion consists in realization. We must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion. ~ Swami Vivekananda

250:Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. ~ Erich Fromm

251:I had resigned my temporary lectureship—thankless, dreary work, from which I would be suddenly distracted by the slightest song, the slightest sound coming from the country outside; in every passing cry I heard an invitation. How often I have leapt from my reading and run to the window to see—nothing pass by! How often I have hurried out of doors. . . The only attention I found possible was that of my five senses. ~ Andr Gide

252:So that's your man? The 'talent' you manage?' 'He had a bad night.' Coolman said tightly. Merry cackled. 'A bad night? The dude's a total homophobe! Also a bigot!' 'There's a culture gap, that's all.' 'No, it's a decency gap, Bob! Your client's a flaming a-hole! What's the matter with you? I'm so disappointed.' Coolman had received other morality lectures, though never from a professional criminal. ~ Carl Hiaasen

253:A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end that is aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character. ~ Aristotle

254:Raflara doğru ilerledi Stoddart Lectures kitabın birinci cildi ile geri döndü. "Görüyor musunuz?" diye bağırdı muzaffer bir edayla, "İşte hakiki bir kitap. Ne kadar yanılmışım . Bu adam tam bir Belasco!1 Bu büyük bir zafer. Ne zevkli ne güzel bir seçim! Hem haddini bilip sayfaları da kesip azaltmamış. Daha ne istenir ki?" 1 David Belasco (1853 - 1931) Amerikalı Oyun yazarı. Devasa bir kütüphaneye sahipti. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

255:And as for your damn parrot fanciers, if they don’t care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there’ll be someone in charge of this place who’ll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen? If we don’t make an effort all they’ll get is silly…stories about talking dogs and Elves Ate My Gerbil, so don’t give me lectures on what’s important and what’s not, understand? ~ Terry Pratchett

256:It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; and that, whether any thing in it was good or bad, could be judged of by the reason. But this was a great mistake; experience shows very often that results are produced precisely the opposite to those which had been expected. We also see from experiment that one generation cannot work out a complete plan of education. ~ Immanuel Kant, in his university lectures "On Pedagogy"

257:I had blackouts, fallen out, of course, the death threats, people showing up, putting guns to my wife's head with mask, and people having shot guns in the driveway, looking for me or announcing that I've already died before lectures and sending it through newspaper - sending it to newspaper columns they send my mother and so on. There's a real night side to my particular calling, which is try to bear witness to love and truth. ~ Cornel West

258:I also started giving Christmas lectures to the house staff and clinic staff that focused on music written by composers who had experienced severe depression or manic-depressive illness. These informal lectures became the basis for a concert that a friend of mine, a professor of music at UCLA, and I subsequently produced in 1985 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In an attempt to raise public awareness about mental illness, ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

259:some of what she said actually offended me. Caitlin truly was a liberal when she arrived in Natchez, and she routinely chastised me for being too conservative. But now it seems that her liberal “convictions” weren’t convictions at all, but rather easy opinions based on the lectures of Ivy League professors. After a few years in the South, she’s ready to give up on racial harmony and flee to more “enlightened”—read homogenous—environs. ~ Greg Iles

260:Computer science... differs from physics in that it is not actually a science. It does not study natural objects. Neither is it, as you might think, mathematics; although it does use mathematical reasoning pretty extensively. Rather, computer science is like engineering; it is all about getting something to do something, rather than just dealing with abstractions, as in the pre-Smith geology. ~ Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Computation, 1970

261:As the years progress, what women and men will discover is that the most lasting and rewarding educational experiences come not from specific information provided in classroom lectures or assigned textbooks, but from the values obtained in active engagement in meaningful issues. We achieve for ourselves only as we appreciate the problems and concerns of others-and only as we see our own lives as part of a much greater social purpose. ~ Manning Marable

262:The problem is that most of us hated school. His fallacy was much the same as progressivism's: the assumption that if he could just explain the facts clearly, build a convincing enough argument, eventually everyone would come around to his conclusion. But people aren't interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story. ~ Tim Kreider

263:They will observe how their children eat cake, how they study, when they tell subtle falsehoods, when they run away from problems rather than face them. They will take the time to make these minor corrections and adjustments, listening to their children, responding to them, tightening a little here, loosening a little there, giving them little lectures, little stories, little hugs and kisses, little admonishments, little pats on the back. ~ M Scott Peck

264:Levedev: It's no great thing to drink - a horse too can drink... No, one must drink intelligently... in our time we used to struggle with lectures all day, but as soon as evening came we went straight off somewhere where the lights were shining and spun like tops til dawn... ... We would talk nonsense and philosophy till our tongues went numb... But today's lot... I don't understand... They wouldn't make God a candle or the Devil a poker. ~ Anton Chekhov

265:For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections. ~ Margaret Mead

266:If she made eye contact now, she’d hear his samples, directionless and at just the right volume. Then more about DESH, and more samples. She had him here for company, though, and not for a lecture. But lectures were all there was to him, aside from his iconics, which were about being blond and fine-boned and wearing clothes more beautifully than any human ever could. He knew everything there was to know about music, and nothing else at all. ~ William Gibson

267:Let’s say you plan to teach a class on a subject you know well. How do you begin? You might create a syllabus, then prepare lectures for each topic in the outline. But is there a better way? Remember, you enjoy access to information and aren’t limited to trial and error. Perhaps you find a book called Make It Stick about the science of successful learning and encounter another mnemonic, RIGOR, that helps you teach different and better. [71] ~ Peter Morville

268:In that moment, I understood Ophelia more than I had in half a semester of my English teacher’s lectures. Whether the boy you love is mad or pretending to be mad, wanting someone you can’t understand or who won’t let you understand will make you go mad yourself. Waiting for his affection was a version of Chinese water torture, desperately waiting for the next drop of any sign that he might like me, unsure when it would come, if it came at all. ~ Dana Schwartz

269:in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose. ~ Scott Berkun

270:Unsure about it, she allowed it to guide her down the stairs and back to the street, through the filthy town where she saw nothing redeeming about the place. Only absolute misery lived here. Along with the pox, neglected children, women in need of stern morals, men in need of lectures and decent role models, and poultry possessing some kind of feather-molting plague that ailed them. Even the cats and dogs seemed to have questionable virtues. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

271:I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion-dollar deficit. ... This notion that somehow we caused the deficits is just wrong. It's just not true. ... If they start trying to give you a bunch of facts and figures suggesting that it's true, what they're not telling you is they baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts and a prescription drug plan that they didn't pay for and the wars. ~ Barack Obama

272:To travel best requires some time preparing for your visit to a particular location - that you don't travel anywhere without spending a few nights reading about the culture and history of the place you are visiting. This is what most of us don't do - we fling ourselves on an exotic destination hoping that someone will tell us what we are looking at, but by that time it's too late, and all the lectures and tour guides simply add to our confusion. ~ Arthur Frommer

273:Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe. ~ bell hooks

274:But I had to keep my hands under the desk—my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law—they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood! I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver “ranting lectures” to them about the United States; some ~ John Irving

275:Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist's waiting room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one's balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one's seat; etc. ~ Albert Camus

276:the years immediately after 1844 Marx’s major literary efforts went into polemical works: The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy. In the course of castigating his opponents Marx developed the materialist conception of history, but did not greatly advance his economic theories. His first attempt to work out these theories in any detail came in 1847, when he gave a series of lectures on economics to the Workingmen’s Club in Brussels. ~ Anonymous

277:Think about it: if I’m sure I’m right, there is little hope of seeing where I am failing. So I keep trying the same old things—the same lectures, for example, and the same punishments. And I keep getting the same outcomes: others with problems. On the one hand, I hate it, but on the other hand, I get my justification, which is what I most want when I’m in the box. My need for justification blinds me to all kinds of possibilities. Even to the obvious ones. ~ The Arbinger Institute

278:Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. “Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden. ~ Joan Didion

279:Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life; dream of it; think of it; live on that idea. Let the brain, the body, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, and this is the way great spiritual giants are produced.” ― Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta Philosophy: Lectures by the Swami Vivekananda on Raja Yoga Also Pantanjali's Yoga Aphorisms, with Commentaries, and Glossary of Sa ~ Swami Vivekananda

280:[About Swami Vivekanada:] I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism... But it was tremendous - something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings. ~ Chittaranjan Das

281:I am sure you are only being modest. Particularly if you like such serious pastimes as botany lectures and books. I can't see the point to either, but dear Grace loves anything that exercises her mind." Lord Jack turned his head, his jewel-colored eyes meeting Grace's over the top of her aunt's bonnet. "Nothing wrong with a bit of exercise for the mind. Or the body." Warmth swirled abruptly to life within her. Anxious to extinguish the flame, Grace looked away. ~ Tracy Anne Warren

282:But even a nice mom and dad like this can't really sense how their child's been assaulted by commercialism ever since she was little, how she's lived in fear of being eaten alive by the morons around her. They just don't get it. Mom always lectures me about not being afraid of getting hurt, but all she can imagine is the kind of hurt she's experienced herself. She has no idea of the threats that surround kids these days, how much we're bullied, how much hurt this causes. ~ Natsuo Kirino

283:Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other's rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk? ~ Stephen Fry

284:Who ever heard of a devout deist? Who ever heard of one who was willing to spend his life in missionary labor for the good of others? It is not according to the constitution of the mind that such a system should awaken the affections. And what is true of this system is true of every false system. All such systems leave the heart cold, and, accordingly, exert very little genuine transforming power over the life. ~ Mark Hopkins, Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846) Lecture V, p. 156

285:For the love of ammonites, man! That's just stupid. Why on earth would the Society need to protect unmarried women from bone-dry lectures regarding soil composition? Do your members find themselves whipped into some sort of dusty frenzy, from which no delicate lass would be safe?" Mr. Barrington tugged on his coat. "Sometimes the debate does get heated." Colin turned to her. "Min, Can I just hit him?" "I think that's a bad idea." "run him through with something sharp? ~ Tessa Dare

286:It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains, Prospectus of Lectures.

287:The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: “If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I’ve drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together—you cannot have what is ‘in here’ unless you have what is ‘out there. ~ Eric Weiner

288:...if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes. ~ E J Dionne Jr

289:Himmler was an ambitious, sinister, idealistic creature of devious ways. His ideas on human behaviour had been gleaned from animal breeding lectures at agricultural college years before. The SS had certain affinities to the Jesuit monastic orders, an enforced mysticism which even Hitler found slightly ludicrous: in 1940, witnessing the pagan Yule celebration of the SS Leibstandarte at Christmas, he quietly commented to an adjutant that this would never take the place of ‘Silent Night. ~ David Irving

290:My general impression about people like Steve Gould and Carl Sagan and so on is that when they disappear as individuals and are no longer appearing on the stage and they are no longer writing, that their lifetime of acknowledgement by the general reading public is not very long... There were many people in the 19th century who were equally famous people who gave working man's lectures, supporters of Darwin, we as scholars know their names but the general public never heard of them. ~ Richard Lewontin

291:Rose,” she said, leaning toward me. “I’m going to be blunt with you. I’m not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren’t my student anymore, I don’t have the right to ask or tell you anything.” It was like what Adrian had said. “You can lecture,” I told her. “I’ve always respected you and want to hear what you have to say.” The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. “All right, here it is. You screwed up.” “Wow. You weren’t kidding about bluntness. ~ Richelle Mead

292:NEVER DO ANYTHING OUT OF HABIT “So in the majority of other things, we address circumstances not in accordance with the right assumptions, but mostly by following wretched habit. Since all that I’ve said is the case, the person in training must seek to rise above, so as to stop seeking out pleasure and steering away from pain; to stop clinging to living and abhorring death; and in the case of property and money, to stop valuing receiving over giving.” —MUSONIUS RUFUS, LECTURES, 6.25.5–11 ~ Ryan Holiday

293:Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth. ~ Albert Camus

294:The point is that there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the evils of poverty in America. Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute it all to values is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t have to be as unjust as they are. ~ Anonymous

295:Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth. ~ Albert Camus

296:The commentaries on the Commedia also began stacking up at my bedside and on the bookshelf next to my chair in the den. There was Charles Williams’s The Face of Beatrice, Harriet Rubin’s Dante in Love, Yale scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta’s Reading Dante, and later the galleys for English Dantist Prue Shaw’s Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. Most important of all, I began listening to the Great Courses audio lectures by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman, which made the poem come alive like nothing else. ~ Rod Dreher

297:…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth. ~ Albert Camus

298:Like her youngest son, Julia administered stern lectures on republican virtue. Before supper, two noblewomen stopped by to school her in palace etiquette. “Mrs. Grant,” one said, “I hope you will not feel fatigued. Our Queen always receives standing.” Julia replied breezily, “Oh, I am sure I will not feel the fatigue. You must remember I too have received for the last eight years and always standing.”32 Julia was at pains to remind the two women that they were dealing with American royalty. The ~ Ron Chernow

299:One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it.... In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string. ~ Paul Dirac, Bombay Lectures (1955)

300:The future was bright for Dr. Schechter. He would be invited to deliver lectures to learned societies. He would be asked to dine with peers of the realm and, after a few drinks, he would be convinced to tell his story, the famous story of how Dr. Schechter had discovered the geniza. Being Jewish, of course, he could not be a full professor at Cambridge. Still, he would have an illustrious career. One day, the name Solomon Schechter would brush the lips of schoolchildren around the world. ~ Michael David Lukas

301:Abolitionists seized on the weapons available to them—petitions, lectures, and the newly invented steam press, which made possible the mass production of pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides—to challenge the conspiracy of silence that increasingly barred discussion of slavery from the national public sphere.43 The movement appealed simultaneously to the hearts and minds of Americans, excoriating slaveowners and exposing the brutal reality of slavery—whippings, separation of families, and so on—while ~ Eric Foner

302:He fielded all questions that students put to him, exhibiting in his lectures and discussions the qualities which have made him a present-day commercial legend: his tough-minded business philosophy; his virtually compulsive adherence to the fundamental operating strategies designed to attract the family market; his emphasis on such basic qualities as courtesy, cleanliness, and service; and his abiding loyalty to his associates, particularly to those who have served McDonald’s since its fledgling years. ~ Ray Kroc

303:…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth. ~ Albert Camus

304:Coming up with lectures is a huge amount of work. I was willing to do one lecture for Gresham because I was honored to have been invited, but to create lectures for a class would probably require that I shut down everything else and concentrate on lectures for a couple of years. Then there would be many, many other skills that I'd have to learn, such as how to sit through a faculty meeting, how to deal with students, etc. It is really not in the cards for me. It's not who I am or what I do. I'm a novelist. ~ Neal Stephenson

305:Fame in this country is a religion that demands human sacrifice, a religion to which I do not wish to belong. You start to take yourself so seriously—I saw it happening to me, after I had written my first book at the age of 23. I’d give lectures or seminars, people would tell me how amazingly great I was, and sooner or later, you believe them. You end up exactly with what Oscar Levant said to George Gershwin: “Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?” After ~ Ken Wilber

306:My dear friend Charles Kiley uses the term "aspirational values" to describe the elusive list of values that reside in our best intentions, on the wall of our cubical, at the heart of our parenting lectures, or in our company's vision statement. If we want to isolate the problems and develop transformation strategies, we have to hold our aspirational values up against what I call our practiced values - how we actually live, feel, behave, and think. Are we walking or talk? Answering this can get very uncomfortable. ~ Bren Brown

307:I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. ~ William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73 (1889).

308:A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin's theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin." ~ Phillip E Johnson

309:SCIENCE AROSE ONLY IN Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatically asserted to a distinguished audience of scholars attending the 1925 Lowell Lectures at Harvard by the great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who explained that science developed in Europe because of the widespread “faith in the possibility of science... derivative from medieval theology. ~ Rodney Stark

310:A number of collections and adaptations of his lectures have been published, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, QED (Penguin, 1990), The Character of Physical Law (Penguin, 1992), Six Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1998), The Meaning of It All (Penguin, 1999), Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1999), The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (Penguin, 1999), The Feynman Lectures on Computation (Penguin, 1999) and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Penguin, 2001). His memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, were published in 1985. ~ Anonymous

311:In marriage we have a duty to God, our spuses, the world, and future generations. But we are sinners. A husband and wife need to acknowledge that when the Bible speaks of fools, it is not just speaking about other people, but about them as well. Even the wisest among us has moments of folly. So God gives us spouses to serve as wise friends by praying with and for us, attending church with us, speaking truth, and providing Scripture along with good books and online classes, lectures, and sermons to nourish fruitfulness in our lives. ~ Mark Driscoll

312:You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters a room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they'd rather not confront. But they do not read them. 'Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible message of discovering on which side of the page you are on. ~ Michael Swanwick

313:The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are. ~ Eric Weiner

314:The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: “If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I’ve drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together—you cannot have what is ‘in here’ unless you have what is ‘out there.’ ” In other words, where we are is vital to who we are. ~ Eric Weiner

315:My research work was based in pictures. I needed to visualise things and projective geometry was often most useful e.g. in figuring out how a particular quantity transforms under Lorentz transf[ormation]. When I came to publish the results I suppressed the projective geometry as the results could be expressed more concisely in analytic form. ~ Paul Dirac, "Recollections of an Exciting Era," three lectures given at Varenna, 5 August 1972, quoted in Peter Galison, "The Suppressed Drawing: Paul Dirac's Hidden Geometry", Representations, No. 72 (Autumn, 2000)

316:The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are. ~ Eric Weiner

317:Americans were materialistic, vain, nekulturny. The lectures at the Academy insisted that the CIA accomplished everything with money and technology, that they had no soul. She would show him soul. Amerikanskiy were also soft, avoiding conflict, avoiding risk. She would reassure him. The KGB had dominated the Americans in the sixties during Khrushchev’s Cold War. It was her turn now. Her hands ached from gripping the vanity. Dominika shrugged on her winter coat and turned for the door. This CIA boy had no idea what was going to happen to him. ~ Jason Matthews

318:Sensing another maternal oration coming on, one of those I-bore-you-and-thus-know-what’s-best-for-you lectures, Richard made a pointed move towards the door. ‘If that’s all for the moment, Mother, I really must be off. The War Office…’ The marchioness gave another of her infamous harrumphs. ‘Have a good time at White’s, darling,’ she said pointedly. Richard paused halfway out the door and flashed her an incredulous look. ‘How do you always know?’ Lady Uppington looked smug. ‘Because I’m your mother. Now, shoo! Get along with you! ~ Lauren Willig

319:But one night, while reading lectures by the philosopher Charles Peirce, James decided to conduct a little experiment. In his diary, he wrote that he would spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. If nothing improved in that year, then it would be apparent that he was truly powerless to the circumstances around him, and then he would take his own life. ~ Mark Manson

320:Dear Dan, I recently attended one of your lectures, and I was wondering why an Israeli guy telling Jewish jokes is wearing an Indian shirt? D.A.: In general I am not someone who should be asked for fashion advice, but this particular case might be the one exception........My solution? I figured that as long as I am wearing clothes from a different culture, no one is politically correct (and this includes almost everyone in the United States ) could complain that I'm underdressed. After all, any such critic could be offending a whole subcontinent. ~ Dan Ariely

321:Zeno gave his lectures on the stoa, the covered walkways or porticos that surrounded the Athenian marketplace. His followers were first called Zenonians and later Stoics. He presided over his school for fifty-eight years and the manner of his death at the age of ninety-eight is bizarre. One day, as he was leaving the school, he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Lying there in pain, he struck the ground with his fist and quoted a line from the Niobe of Timotheus, “I come of my own accord; why then call me?” He died on the spot through holding his breath. ~ Simon Critchley

322:was invited by Trinity College, Cambridge, to become a lecturer, but not a Fellow. The difference is not pecuniary; it is that a Fellow has a vote in the government of the College, and cannot be dispossessed during the term of his Fellowship except for grave immorality. The chief reason for not offering me a Fellowship was that the clerical party did not wish to add to the anti-clerical vote. The result was that they were able to dismiss me in 1916, when they disliked my views on the war.* If I had been dependent on my lectureship, I should have starved. ~ Bertrand Russell

323:Having had the wrong education as a start in his racial career, the Negro has become his own greatest enemy. Most of the trouble I have had in advancing the cause of the race has come from Negroes. Booker Washington aptly described the race in one of his lectures by stating that we were like crabs in a barrel, that none would allow the other to climb over, but on any such attempt all would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that would make the effort to climb out. Yet, those of us with vision cannot desert the race, leaving it to suffer and die. ~ Marcus Garvey

324:In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

325:In England Giordano Bruno had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors - that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith. ~ John William Draper

326:I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry. ~ Maya Lin

327:Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback. ~ Walter Isaacson

328:The evangelists for bitcoin, the much-hyped digital currency that is a strange mixture of the visionary and the fraudulent—are, in a sense, not imaginative enough. They are simply trying to reproduce in the electronic world a commodity—currency—that has long existed in the material world. The larger question is whether currency as we have known it is any longer necessary at all. I once joked with beginning students that money existed because when a pipe burst it took too long to find a plumber in need of economics lectures—but today it is possible to locate that plumber. It ~ John Kay

329:It should be obvious that technologies are capable of replacing teachers and professors in a wide variety of settings. The current buzzword for this is the flipped classroom—students watch lectures and learn the material online at home, then do their homework at school with the help of teachers and teaching assistants. Teachers may no longer need to prepare or deliver lectures, reducing them to what could be called “learning coaches.” The diminished skill set required is sure to transform the profession and create yet more challenges for our already beleaguered teachers. ~ Jerry Kaplan

330:My dear sir, you have presented yourself from such an angle … You’re a professor? A professor?” “I once had the honor of delivering several lectures to the youth of—— University.” “Yo-o-outh!” Lembke seemed to jump, though I wager he still had little understanding of what it was about, and even, perhaps, of whom he was talking with. “That, my very dear sir, I will not allow,” he suddenly became terribly angry. “I do not allow youth. It’s all these tracts. It’s a swoop upon society, my dear sir, a seafaring swoop, filibusterism … What is your request, if you please? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

331:By one tomorrow, I'll look enough like her to pass. I'm calling Mavis." "Oh." Peabody brightened. "Oh, that's iced." "Easy for you to say. You won't have to listen to lectures from her and Trina on why I haven't had my eyebrows shaped lately, or why I haven't used the butt cream or whatever. And I'll probably have to agree to a full treatment after the op." This was said with undisguised bitterness. "I know how they work." "You're a true soldier, sir, sacrificing yourself for the cause." "Wipe that smile off your face, Officer." "Wiping, sir. ~ J D Robb

332:[Faculty...] insisted that the lecture and live demonstration was a sacred space. Faculty talked about the importance of debating with students, responding to questions, and presenting a model for how to argue a point and respect differences. They talked about the sanctity of live demonstrations—the importance of doing science in real time. They wanted students to watch live, imperfect lectures and demonstrations and feel part of an in-person community. They say the classroom as a place where you learned to love the 'as-is' of nature as much as you love the 'as-if' of the virtual. ~ Sherry Turkle

333:Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists and free-traders, inflationists and believers in the gold standard. He ought to be encouraged to read the best books of the various schools, as recommended by those who believe in them. This would teach him to weigh arguments and evidence, to know that no pinion is certainly right, and to judge men by their quality rather than by their consonance with preconceptions. ~ Bertrand Russell

334:I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age. ~ Thomas Jefferson

335:Tengo's lectures took on uncommon warmth, and the students found themselves swept up in his eloquence. He taught them how to practically and effectively solve mathematical problems while simultaneously presenting a spectacular display of the romance concealed in the questions it posed. Tengo saw admiration in the eyes of several of his female students, and he realized that he was seducing these seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds through mathematics. His eloquence was a kind of intellectual foreplay. Mathematical functions stroked their backs; theorems sent warm breath into their ears. ~ Haruki Murakami

336:Individuation, as Jung put it in one of his lectures, is “the psychological process that makes of a human being an individual – a unique, indivisible unit or ‘whole man’.” In other words, individuation is the process of cultivating wholeness and becoming our authentic and true selves. Not only is individuation the process of becoming a fully mature human being, but it is also the process of finding our essence, our very Souls. However, when this process of individuation gets disrupted within us due to various life experiences, we end up developing a weak sense of self and a tenuous grip on reality. ~ Aletheia Luna

337:teaching math was convoluted and confusing, his grammar lessons could bore a statue to tears, and when it came to Ethoen history and mythology, Jahrra often found herself tempted to launch her pen at him.  He never got anything right, often obscuring facts or making heroes out to be twisted or idiotic.  Jahrra usually went into daydream mode during his lectures, but one day his lesson was so outrageous she couldn’t even lose herself in her own thoughts. “I wish we didn’t have such an awful teacher,” Gieaun groaned as they streamed out of the stuffy classroom on their final day of school. “I ~ Jenna Elizabeth Johnson

338:I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I had found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. . . . I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books. ~ Carl Sagan

339:Weekly Reviews ::: Dedicate at least one afternoon or entire evening during the weekend to review all of your courses. Make certain you have an understanding of where each course is going and that your study schedule is appropriate. Do the 4x6 thing: One card for each chapter. Then ask yourself how each chapter relates to other chapters, and then, how the readings relate to each of the lectures. Are there contradictions? Differences of opinion, approach, method? What evidence is there to support the differences of opinion? What are your views? Can you defend them? A good exercise. ~ Dr Robert A Hatch, How to Study,

340:I grant you that my children need their meals balanced. If you like, I shall take the pledge here and now to see to it that they get greens along with their starches. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world. If they get a course from me at all, it should not be a string of lectures on how best to adapt reality to their uses, but a series of laboratory sessions where their senses can be exposed to the delectability of being as such. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

341:In hundreds of lectures around the world, I’ve done most of the scary, tragic, embarrassing things that terrify people. I’ve been heckled by drunken crowds in a Boston bar. I’ve lectured to empty seats, and a bored janitor, in New York City. I’ve had a laptop crash in a Moscow auditorium; a microphone die at a keynote speech in San Jose; and I’ve watched helplessly as the Parisian executives who hired me fell asleep in the conference room while I was speaking. The secret to coping with these events is to realize everyone forgets about them after they happen — except for one person: me. No one else really cares that much. ~ Scott Berkun

342:I have no idea what my siblings did when they did school, but when I did it I opened my math book and spent ten minutes turning pages, running my fingers down the center fold. If my finger touched fifty pages, I’d report to Mother that I’d done fifty pages of math. “Amazing!” she’d say. “You see? That pace would never be possible in the public school. You can only do that at home, where you can sit down and really focus, with no distractions.” Mother never delivered lectures or administered exams. She never assigned essays. There was a computer in the basement with a program called Mavis Beacon, which gave lessons on typing. ~ Tara Westover

343:All the books, all the lectures, all the pages of ... of information, areas nothing against the measure of our experience -- and by that he meant the experience we take to heart, that we go back to, trying to work out the why, what, and how of whatever has come about in our lives. That, he said, is where we learn the value of true knowledge, with our life's lessons to draw upon so that we might one day be blessed with wisdom. I may not be there yet, but the better part of me is doing my utmost, and one of the elements of life I am learning the hard way is the wisdom to be found in forgiveness. It's what is setting me free. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

344:GOVERNOR. And then I must call your attention to the history teacher. He has a lot of learning in his head and a store of facts. That's evident. But he lectures with such ardor that he quite forgets himself. Once I listened to him. As long as he was talking about the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was not so bad. But when he reached Alexander of Macedon, I can't describe what came over him. Upon my word, I thought a fire had broken out. He jumped down from the platform, picked up a chair and dashed it to the floor. Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that's no reason for breaking chairs. The state must bear the cost. ~ Nikolai Gogol

345:Imanuel Ehrenhardt I began with Sir William Hamilton's lectures. Then studied Dugald Stewart; And then John Locke on the Understanding, And then Descartes, Fichte and Schelling, Kant and then Schopenhauer -Books I borrowed from old Judge Somers. All read with rapturous industry Hoping it was reserved to me To grasp the tail of the ultimate secret, And drag it out of its hole. My soul flew up ten thousand miles, And only the moon looked a little bigger. Then I fell back, how glad of the earth! All through the soul of William Jones Who showed me a letter of John Muir. ~ Edgar Lee Masters

346:If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments - ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

347:Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

348:Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training results in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours. ~ Laszlo Bock

349:/Farsi Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral. You can never see your own face, only a reflection, not the face itself. So you sigh in front of mirrors and cloud the surface. It's better to keep your breath cold. Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean. One slight movement, the mirror-image goes. Don't be dead or asleep or awake. Don't be anything. What you most want, what you travel around wishing to find, lose yourself as lovers lose themselves, and you'll be that. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks ~ Farid ud-Din Attar, Looking for your own face

350:One of the most irritating conversations I’ve had is with people who lecture me on how I should behave. Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge. I am tired of the moralizing slow-thinkers who pound me with platitudes like I should floss daily, eat my regular apple, and visit the gym outside of the New Year’s resolution. In the markets the recommendation would be to ignore the noise component in the performance. We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

351:Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours. ~ Ben Horowitz

352:For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe? ~ Terry Pratchett

353:What happened?” “Well,” said Jared. “Your mother threw her bedside lamp at me.” Kami looked over at her mother, who looked apologetic. She could picture the whole scene: her mother waking to fire and chaos, and finding a Lynburn’s face framed against the nightmare. She was quite proud of her mother for fighting back. “That’s what happens when you insist on going around wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle,” she remarked. “When you start dating a girl, parents are going to have strong words. Deliver lectures. Set curfews. Hurl projectiles.” Jared shrugged. “About how I always expected it would go, yeah. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

354:I wonder why Miss Kosugi's lectures are always so stiff. Is she a fool? It makes me sad. She went on and on, explaining to us about patriotism, but wasn't that pretty obvious? I mean, everyone loves the place where they were born. I felt bored. Resting my chin on my desk, I gazed idly out the window. The clouds were beautiful, maybe because it was so windy. There were four roses blooming in a corner of the yard. One was yellow, two were white, and one was pink. I sat there agape, looking at the flowers, and thought to myself, There are really good things about human beings. I mean, it's humans who discovered the beauty of flowers, and humans who admire them. At ~ Osamu Dazai

355:Lyall wanted Tristan’s kisses and his body and to have him close enough his scent would permeate rooms and make him smile when he walked into them. But he didn’t want it more than he wanted Tristan’s words, rushed in a voice messages and often too formal in emails, and in perfectly composed lectures full of masterful analogies. And not just for him, but for other people who needed to hear they didn’t have to be trapped by the vicissitudes of chance, that their bodies could be coaxed into allowing them enough freedom to find happiness—for without freedom there was no happiness possible. The distance would be harder, but it did not mean more than their closeness. ~ N J Lysk

356:If Kris could play enough of these, in the right order, without stopping, she could block out everything: the dirty snow that never melted, closets full of secondhand clothes, overheated classrooms at Independence High, mind-numbing lectures about the Continental Congress and ladylike behavior and the dangers of of running with the wrong crowd and what x equals and how to find for y and what the third person plural for cantar is and what Holden Caulfield's basement glove symbolizes and what the whale symbolizes and what the green light symbolizes and what everything in the world symbolizes, because apparently nothing is what it seems and everything is a trick. ~ Grady Hendrix

357:There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over. "There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven. ~ G K Chesterton

358:Once-unimpeachable federal agencies now appear as 19th-century tribal fiefdoms. No one much trusts the IRS anymore. Partisan politics seem to determine whether Americans are audited. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs covered up callous — and occasionally lethal — treatment of scores of hospitalized veterans. The National Security Agency lied about monitoring the communications of average Americans. Almost nothing in Obama’s lectures about the new unaffordable Affordable Care Act proved accurate. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot come clean about the nation’s utter lack of border enforcement with Mexico. The once-hallowed Secret Service seems incompetent and scandal-ridden. ~ Anonymous

359:Fanaticism is the opposite of love,’ I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai’s lectures. A wise man once told me—he’s a Muslim, by the way—that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject. ~ Gregory David Roberts

360:I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” They were studying to learn, not just to ace the test. And, actually, this was why they got higher grades—not because they were smarter or had a better background in science. Instead of losing their motivation when the course got dry or difficult, they said: “I maintained my interest in the material.” “I stayed positive about taking chemistry.” “I kept myself motivated to study.” Even if they thought the textbook was boring or the instructor was a stiff, they didn’t let their motivation evaporate. That just made it all the more important to motivate themselves. ~ Carol S Dweck

361:Therapies often convey to the client that their body is not behaving adequately. The clients are told they need to be different. They need to change. So therapy in itself is extraordinarily evaluative of the individual. And once we are evaluated, we are basically in defensive states. We are not in safe states. Dr. Buczynski: And teaching is, as well. Dr. Porges: Yes. I have given a few lectures on mindfulness, and in these lectures I state that mindfulness requires feeling safe. Because, if we don’t feel safe, we are neurophysiologically evaluative of our setting, which precludes feeling safe. In this defensive state, we can’t engage others and we can’t recruit the wonderful neural circuits ~ Stephen W Porges

362:Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted. ~ Gary Taubes

363:The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger! ~ Richard Feynman, Lecture 1. "Photons: Corpuscles of Light" (1979) Sir Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, University of Auckland.

364:(prof.) Augustus était de nouveau sur moi ; tandis que sa bouche emplie de mots m’enserrait le cou avec sa puissance d’un lasso, ma voix parlait intérieurement. Dans l’air ambiant, ses mains ont pénétré les choses. J’étais seule, élue entre tous. J’avais accepté de relever le défi. Sérieux, dominant, Augustus a traversé l’estrade. Ses yeux, véritables planètes en orbite, ont décrit une révolution autour de moi. Il a lâché une question à laquelle aurait pu répondre avec flaccidité n’importe quelle taupe sortie du tunnel peu profond de lectures hégéliennes que nous explorions. Il a promené son regard sur des rares doigts levés, prêts à se risquer, comme s’il cherchait quelqu’un « en particulier ». ~ Pola Oloixarac

365:My Parents had early given me religious Impressions, and brought me through my Childhood piously in the Dissenting Way. But I was scarce 15 when, after doubting by turns of several Points as I found them disputed in the different Books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some Books against Deism fell into my Hands; they were said to be the Substance of Sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much Stronger than the Refutations. In short I soon became a thorough Deist. [Part I, p. 45 of autobiography] ~ Benjamin Franklin

366:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use." ~ Hal Abelson (1986) Introduction of video of lectures on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (source).

367:I have a hunch it’s a thing that only fails to be basic because it’s never had material recognition. The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the clinical, the ‘practical’— he has won his battle without a struggle.” “On the contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because fate selected you for your profession before you were born. You better thank God you had no ‘bent’— I got to be a psychiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda’s in Oxford that went to the same lectures. Maybe I’m getting trite but I don’t want to let my current ideas slide away with a few dozen glasses of beer. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

368:Where would you like to be, what would you most like to be doing professionally ten years from now, twenty years, fifty? Next, imagine that you are much older and looking back on a successful career. What kind of great discovery, and in what field of science, would you savor most having made? I recommend creating scenarios that end with goals, then choosing ones you might wish to pursue. Make it a practice to indulge in fantasy about science. Make it more than just an occasional exercise. Daydream a lot. Make talking to yourself silently a relaxing pastime. Give lectures to yourself about important topics that you need to understand. Talk with others of like mind. By their dreams you shall know them. ~ Edward O Wilson

369:Even before my grandmother could beat or punish me for one thing or another, before my father could sit me down to lecture me about my defiant disobedience, I was already hemorrhaging internally from dragging myself through my own mental and emotional bloodbath. Years of beatings and lectures and punishments had taught me not only that was I untrustworthy but also that I should not and could not trust my own instincts. I carried those thoughts and feelings—a sense of myself as shameful, guilty, and wrong—well into adulthood. In the process, I gave others way too much space and authority to define me and determine my choices, because what I wanted didn’t matter and I could not trust myself to make good choices. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

370:Destiny The chicken I bought last night, Frozen, Returned to life, Laid the biggest egg in the world, And was awarded the Nobel Prize. The phenomenal egg Was passed from hand to hand, In a few weeks had gone all round the earth, And round the sun In 365 days. The hen received who knows how much hard currency, Assessed in buckets of grain Which she couldn’t manage to eat Because she was invited everywhere, Gave lectures, granted interviews, Was photographed. Very often reporters insisted That I too should pose Beside her. And so, having served art Throughout my life, All of a sudden I’ve attained to fame As a poultry breeder. ~ Marin Sorescu

371:There is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know, the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse the desire to know, which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men desire to know. Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world? ~ Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know (1970), pp. 4-5.

372:You’re going to pay for this, Dodger!” The mischievous creature thought everything in the world was for his own amusement. No basket or container could go without being overturned or investigated, no stocking or comb or handkerchief could be left alone. Dodger stole personal items and left them in heaps beneath chairs and sofas, and he took naps in drawers of clean clothes, and worst of all, he was so entertaining in his naughtiness that the entire Hathaway family was inclined to overlook his behavior. Whenever Poppy objected to the ferret’s outrageous antics, Beatrix was always apologetic and promised that Dodger would never do it again, and she seemed genuinely surprised when Dodger didn’t heed her earnest lectures. ~ Lisa Kleypas

373:Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit. ~ Aristotle

374:Ida Chicken After I had attended lectures At our Chautauqua, and studied French For twenty years, committing the grammar Almost by heart, I thought I'd take a trip to Paris To give my culture a final polish. So I went to Peoria for a passport -(Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning.) And there the clerk of the district Court Made me swear to support and defend The constitution -- yes, even me -Who couldn't defend or support it at all! And what do you think? That very morning The Federal Judge, in the very next room To the room where I took the oath, Decided the constitution Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes For the water works of Spoon River! ~ Edgar Lee Masters

375:These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow. ~ Hermann Hesse

376:As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes are small and rapidly forgotten. I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which other people are in love with their fate—and never, until my brush with academia, did I think that that environment was a certain form of commerce (combined with solitary scholarship). The biologist-writer and libertarian economist Matt Ridley made me feel that it was truly the Phoenician trader in me (or, more exactly, the Canaanite) that was the intellectual.4 ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

377:/Farsi Those unable to grieve, or to speak of their love, or to be grateful, those who can't remember God as the source of everything, might be described as a vacant wind, or a cold anvil, or a group of frightened old people. Say the Name. Moisten your tongue with praise, and be the spring ground, waking. Let your mouth be given its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose's. As you fill with wisdom, and your heart with love, there's no more thirst. There's only unselfed patience waiting on the doorsill, a silence which doesn't listen to advice from people passing in the street. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks ~ Hakim Sanai, The Wild Rose of Praise

378:The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? ~ Henry Miller

379:In 1995, on the strength of the book, the famously conservative Hillsdale College invited me to participate in a series of lectures on welfare. My subject was to be “Race Relations and Welfare.” Bell Curve author Charles Murray was also a speaker, and the evening before my talk he and I participated in a long private conversation with several others about race and IQ, and the implications of racial differences for American society. Lissa Roche, daughter-in-law of Hillsdale president George Roche and one of the conference organizers, was present and joined actively in the conversation. The next day, in my talk, I spoke in some detail about black-white IQ differences, which I offered as one of the reasons blacks are more likely than whites to be on welfare. ~ Jared Taylor

380:Show Me! I would rather see a Mason, than hear one any day, I would rather one would walk with me than merely show the way. The eye's a better pupil and more willing than the ear, Fine counsel is confusing, but example's always clear. And the best of all the Masons are the men who live their creeds, For to see the good in action is what everybody needs. I can soon learn how to do it if you'll let me see it done, I can watch your hands in action, but your tongue too fast may run. And the lectures you deliver may be wise and true, But I'd rather get my lesson by observing what you do. For I may misunderstand you and the high advice you give, But there's no misunderstanding how you act and how you live. ~ Edgar Albert Guest

381:/Farsi The sun can only be seen by the light of the sun. The more a man or woman knows, the greater the bewilderment, the closer to the sun the more dazzled, until a point is reached where one no longer is. A mystic knows without knowledge, without intuition or information, without contemplation or description or revelation. Mystics are not themselves. They do not exist in selves. They move as they are moved, talk as words come, see with sight that enters their eyes. I met a woman once and asked her where love had led her. "Fool, there's no destination to arrive at. Loved one and lover and love are infinite." [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks ~ Farid ud-Din Attar, Mysticism

382:We don’t grow and mature in our Christian life by sitting in a classroom and library, listening to lectures and reading books, or going to church and singing hymns and listening to sermons. We do it by taking the stuff of our ordinary lives, our parents and children, our spouses and friends, our workplaces and fellow workers, our dreams and fantasies, our attachments, our easily accessible gratifications, our depersonalizing of intimate relations, our commodification of living truths into idolatries, taking all this and placing it on the altar of refining fire—our God is a consuming fire—and finding it all stuff redeemed for a life of holiness. A life that is not reserved for nuns and monks but accessible to every Dick and Jane in every ordinary congregation. ~ Eugene H Peterson

383:During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.” During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with ten-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of origin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner. ~ Anne Fadiman

384:/Farsi Then through that dim murkiness, I saw an old man with a radiant face. "You are the moon!" I called out. "Where did you come from?" "I am beyond substance and space. I am creation's cause, here to lead you back to your home. Hold close. and let my fire consume you. Don't be afraid of losing your strength here. This fire is one which has a spring of eternal water inside it. As your animal-soul dies, your new soul will be born. Live humbly with me, and I will raise you into majesty." He talked more to me in silence, without using syllables. He gave me love and light and eyes to see, and together we set out. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks ~ Hakim Sanai, Then through that dim murkiness

385:Every phase and question of life is brought more and more into the limelight. Theatres, cinemas, the radio, and even lectures, assist the process. But they do not, and should not replace reading, because when we are just watching and listening, somebody is taking very good care that we should not stop and think. The danger in this age is not of our remaining ignorant; it is that we should lose the power of thinking for ourselves. Problems are more and more put before us, but, except to crossword puzzles and detective mysteries, do we attempt to find the answers for ourselves? Less and less. The short cut seems ever more and more desirable. But the short cut to knowledge is nearly always the longest way round. There is nothing like knowledge, picked up by or reasoned out for oneself. ~ John Galsworthy

386:In 1992, he took over as the Scientific Advisor to the Minister of Defence and secretary, Department of Research and Development, and continued till he was seventy. The country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, was conferred on him in 1997. A year later, in 1998, he led the team that conducted India’s second nuclear tests in Pokhran. Five nuclear tests were conducted consecutively and India became a nuclear power. In 1999, he was appointed principal scientific advisor to the government of India with the rank of a Cabinet minister. By 2001, he was enjoying a teacher’s life at Anna University in Chennai. Meant to lecture a class of sixty, most of his lectures ended up in an overflowing hall with about 200 students instead. In 2002, he was elected the eleventh President of India. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam

387:Grothendieck transformed modern mathematics. However, much of the credit for this transformation should go to a lesser-known forerunner of his, Emmy Noether. It was Noether, born in Bavaria in 1882, who largely created the abstract approach that inspired category theory.1 Yet as a woman in a male academic world, she was barred from holding a professorship in Göttingen, and the classicists and historians on the faculty even tried to block her from giving unpaid lectures—leading David Hilbert, the dean of German mathematics, to comment, “I see no reason why her sex should be an impediment to her appointment. After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse.” Noether, who was Jewish, fled to the United States when the Nazis took power, teaching at Bryn Mawr until her death from a sudden infection in 1935. ~ Jim Holt

388:is difficult, from a present-day standpoint, to appreciate the intoxicating effect of Hegel’s thought on a generation of educated Prussians. It was not a question of Hegel’s pedagogical charisma – he was notorious for standing hunched over the lectern reading out his text in a halting and scarcely audible mumble. According to an account by his student Hotho, who attended Hegel’s lectures at the University of Berlin, ‘his features hung pale and loose upon him as if he were already dead.’ ‘He sat there morosely with his head wearily bowed down in front of him, constantly leafing back and forth through his compendious notes, even as he continued to speak.’ Another student, the future Hegel-biographer Karl Rosenkranz, recalled laborious paragraphs punctuated by constant coughing and snuff-taking. ~ Christopher Clark

389:Reading was the only subject at which I excelled. I would much rather be reading James Fenimore Cooper than dealing with participles in French. My poor school performance was puzzling because my parents saw that I possessed intelligence and curiosity. Marine biology became a passion. When I asked them to drive me to Boston to hear lectures by Jacques Cousteau, my first hero, they were happy to do so. They took me to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, a paradise for a kid in love with water. I was obsessed with learning from those men who explored the deep. I wanted to go deep. I was told that if I kept up my grades I could come back one summer and intern at Woods Hole. That never happened. My grades were below average. That became the great mystery of my childhood: Why was I having ~ Joe Perry

390:I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them, "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup. ~ Henry Rollins

391:life, can become the truth of your life. He imagined them in Paris trying to talk to each other. She’d give small lectures on the country’s innovative health care system; he’d give similar disquisitions on French jurisprudence. That would get them through one day, maybe two. Then they’d start making small talk about whatever was in front of them at that moment: the charming Parisian streets, the weather, the waiters, the daylight that clung on until well past ten. Museums would be a good choice because of the enforced silence. But then they’d be at a restaurant looking at menus and she’d say what looked good and he’d say what looked good and they’d stare at the plates of other diners and point out those that also looked good and express how they were perhaps changing their mind about what they intended to ~ Nathan Hill

392:Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption. ~ Ursula K Le Guin

393:Science lectures dealt with social problems that still could be solved, not defunct political systems for which both the proponents and the opponents had died before my birth. Science didn't talk about books that had been written to analyze other books that had originally been written as retellings of ancient books; it talked about what was happening now and of a future that might yet be. The very attributes that rendered me a nuisance to all of my previous teachers - my inability to let things go coupled with my tendency to overdo everything - were exactly what my science professors liked to see. They accepted me despite the fact that I was just a girl, and assured me of what I already suspected: that my true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances. ~ Hope Jahren

394:To My Brother Miguel In Memoriam Brother, today I sit on the brick bench of the house, where you make a bottomless emptiness. I remember we used to play at this hour, and mama caressed us: "But, sons..." Now I go hide as before, from all evening lectures, and I trust you not to give me away. Through the parlor, the vestibule, the corridors. Later, you hide, and I do not give you away. I remember we made ourselves cry, brother, from so much laughing. Miguel, you went into hiding one night in August, toward dawn, but, instead of chuckling, you were sad. And the twin heart of those dead evenings grew annoyed at not finding you. And now a shadow falls on my soul. Listen, brother, don't be late coming out. All right? Mama might worry. ~ Cesar Vallejo

395:When Richard created the Purple Gentian, the talent for ancient languages that had stunned his schoolmasters at Eton had come to his aid once again. While Sir Percy had pretended to be a fop, Richard bored the French into complacency with long lectures about antiquity. When Frenchmen demanded to know what he was doing in France, and Englishmen reproached him for fraternising with the enemy, Richard opened his eyes wide and proclaimed, ‘But a scholar is a citizen of the world!’ Then he quoted Greek at them. They usually didn’t ask again. Even Gaston Delaroche, the Assistant Minister of Police, who had sworn in blood to be avenged on the Purple Gentian and had the tenacity of…well, of Richard’s mother, had stopped snooping around Richard after being subjected to two particularly knotty passages from the Odyssey. ~ Lauren Willig

396:5. When in Doubt ::: Read the Syllabus - Read Ahead - Ask Questions: Read the correlated readings (designed to mesh with that lecture) before you come to class. The whole point of correlated readings is to prepare you for the lecture. If the readings are completed at the appropriate time you will have a 'Big Picture' framed by a general narrative and suspended by an ongoing line of argument. These readings should help you establish a set of expectations as well as some unsettling questions. The lectures should help you connect ideas you have read about and, with any luck, they should help you call key issues into question. Your job is to arrive at an understanding you call your own and can defend to a critical audience. Beginning to end, you are the center of your education. You know where to begin. ~ Dr Robert A Hatch, How to Study,

397:The problems on campus life today are not about free speech. They are about how the students have absolutely nothing to do with their lives but sit and listen to lectures, find the best parties to attend, and otherwise discover first-world problems to stew about and protest. That's the root of the problem. This is not a commercial environment where people are incentivized to find value in each other. Campuses have become completely artificial 4-year holding tanks for infantilized kids with zero experience in actual life in which people find ways to get along. These students are not serving each other in a market exchange, and very few have worked at day in their lives, so their default is to find some offense and protest. It's all they've been taught to do and all they know how to do. Idle hands and parents' money = trouble. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

398:Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably. ~ Henry David Thoreau

399:I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with the time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil. ~ Howard Zinn

400:Antonio's fixation was always the same: Sarratore's son {Nino}. He was afraid that I would talk to him, even that I would see him {at school}. Naturally, to prevent him from suffering, I concealed the fact that I ran into Nino entering school, coming out, in the corridors. Nothing particularly happened, at most we exchanged a nod of greeting and went on our way: I could have talked to my boyfriend about it without any problems if he had been a reasonable person. But Antonio was not reasonable and in truth I wasn't either. Although Nino gave me no encouragement, a mere glimpse of him left me distracted during class. His presence a few classrooms away—real, alive, better educated than the professors, and courageous, and disobedient—drained meaning from the teachers' lectures, the pages of books, the plans for marriage, the gas pump on the Stradonr. ~ Elena Ferrante

401:Look, if you’re going to insist that I’ve taught you something, I guess I should give you a final exam.” “Really?” “One question.” “Sure.” “Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom, okay? Don’t just glance at it. It is very important that you examine it very closely. Think about what it means.” “Okay.” “And then answer this question. Does it make your heart flutter?” “Does it make my heart flutter?” “Yes or no. It’s a yes or no question. No equations allowed.” “All right, I’ll let you know.” “Don’t be dense. I don’t need to know. You need to know. This exam is self-graded. And it’s not the answer that counts, it’s what you do with the information.” We locked eyes. His younger face flashed in my mind. The energetic, smiling bongo drum player I had seen pictured in the front of his book, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. A question popped from my lips. ~ Anonymous

402:William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal ball. Wheather the voices and visions in these contexts were veridical was less of a concern to James than the mental states which could produce them. Careful observation convinced him that mediums and crystal gazers were not usually conscious charlatans or liars in the ordinary sense, nor were they confabulators or phantasm. They were, he came to feel, in altered states of consciousness conducive to hallucinations - hallucinations whose content was shaped by the questions they were asked. These exceptional mental states, he thought, were achieved by self-hypnosis, no doubt facilitated by poorly lit and ambiguous surroundings and the eager expectations of their clients. ~ Oliver Sacks

403:Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

404:A toast," Smooth Kitty cried, feeling almost giddy, "to self-government. Saint Etheldreda's School for Young Ladies will be run by young ladies from this point forward. Hear, hear!" Great applause. "To independence!" added Pocked Louise. "No fussy old widows telling us when not to speak, and how to set the spoons when an Earl's niece comes to supper. And telling us to leave scientific experiment to the men." Teacup toasts in support of Louise. "To freedom!" chimed in Disgraceful Mary Jane. "No curfews and evil eyes and lectures on morals and propriety." Loud, if nervous, cheering. "To womankind," proclaimed Stout Alice. "Each of us girls free to be what she wishes to be, without glum and crotchety Placketts trying to make us into what we're not." Tremendous excitement. "To sisterhood," said Dear Roberta, "and standing by each other, no matter what. ~ Julie Berry

405:I wonder if you've ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? ~ Daniel Quinn

406:Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations-boring lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, those necessary breakup conversations, and the like: maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and masklike, with your faintest hint at a Gioconda smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you are about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now, with the index finger of your inner hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you..." over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary. ~ David Rakoff

407:Anyone could tell us two writers shouldn’t be together. Or rather, that a competitive American shouldn’t be with a woman who has written a book.”“That’s right,”he said. “It’s a challenge to my sexual superiority, and that isn’t a joke.”“I know it isn’t. But please don’t give me any more of your pompous socialist lectures about the equality of men and women.”“I shall probably give you pompous lectures because I enjoy it. But I won’t believe in them myself. The truth is, I resent you for having written a book which was a success. And I’ve come to the conclusion I’ve always been a hypocrite, and in fact I enjoy a society where women are second-class citizens, I enjoy being boss and being flattered.”“Good,”I said. “Because in a society where not one man in ten thousand begins to understand the ways in which women are second-class citizens, we have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites. ~ Doris Lessing

408:It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection. Though human dissection was an accepted practice in the Renaissance-era anatomy class, most professors shied away from personally undertaking it, preferring to deliver their lectures while seated in raised chairs a safe and tidy remove from the corpse and pointing out structures with a wooden stick while a hired hand did the slicing. Vesalius disapproved of this practice, and wasn’t shy about his feelings. In C. D. O’Malley’s biography of the man, Vesalius likens the lecturers to “jackdaws aloft in their high chair, with egregious arrogance croaking things they have never investigated but merely committed to memory from the books of others. Thus everything is wrongly taught,…and days are wasted in ridiculous questions. ~ Mary Roach

409:Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit. ~ Aristotle

410:Within a few moments he was immersed in his work. The evening before, he had caught up with the routine of his classwork; papers had been graded and lectures prepared for the whole week that was to follow. He saw the evening before hm, and several evenings more, in which he would be free to work on his book. What he wanted to do in this new book was not yet precisely clear to him; in general, he wished to extend himself beyond his first study, in both time and scope. He wanted to work in the period of the English Renaissance and to extend his study of classical and medieval Latin influences into that area. He was in the stage of planning his study, and it was that stage which gave him the most pleasure—the selection among alternative approaches, the rejection of certain strategies, the mysteries and uncertainties that lay in unexplored possibilities, the consequences of choice…. The possibilities he could see so exhilarated him that he could not keep still. ~ John Williams

411:Rose," Alberta said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything." "You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say." The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up." "Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness." "The reasons don't matter. You shouldn't have left. You shouldn't have dropped out. Your education and training are too valuable—no matter how much you think you know—and you are too talented to risk throwing away your future." I almost laughed. "To tell you the truth? I'm not sure what my future is anymore." "Which is why you need to graduate." "But I dropped out." She snorted. "Then drop back in!" "I—what? How?" "With paperwork. Just like everything else in the world. ~ Richelle Mead

412:If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? ~ Anonymous

413:There are forty-eight physicians and surgeons, but not all are lecturers. Including yourself, there are twenty-seven students of medicine. Each clerk is apprenticed to a series of different physicians. The apprenticeships vary in length for different individuals, and so does the entire clerkship. You become a candidate for oral examination whenever the bastardly faculty decides you are ready. If you pass, they address you as Hakim. If you fail, you remain a student and must work toward another chance.” “How long have you been here?” Karim glowered, and Rob knew he had asked the wrong question. “Seven years. I’ve taken examinations twice. Last year, I failed the section on philosophy. My second attempt was three weeks ago, when I made a poor thing of questions on jurisprudence. What should I care about the history of logic or the precedents of the law? I’m already a good physician.” He sighed bitterly. “In addition to classes in medicine you must attend lectures in law, theology, and philosophy. ~ Noah Gordon

414:Pretty soon after returning from Everest, I was asked to give a lecture on the Everest expedition to my local sailing club in the Isle of Wight. It would be the first of many lectures that I would eventually give, and would soon become my main source of income after returning from the mountain. Those early talks were pretty ropey, though, by anyone’s standards. That first one went okay, mainly due to the heavy number of family members in the audience. Dad cried, Mum cried, Lara cried. Everyone was proud and happy. The next talk was to a group of soldiers on a course with the SAS. I took one of my old buddies along with me for moral support. Huge Mackenzie-Smith always jokes to this day how, by the time I finished, the entire room had fallen asleep. (They had been up all night on an exercise, I hasten to add--but still--it wasn’t my finest hour.) We had to wake them--one by one. I had a lot to learn about communicating a story if I was to earn any sort of a living by giving talks. ~ Bear Grylls

415:I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ...I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy... but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism... gave... lectures... with that very word in its title,—flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us... understood all that he said—yet here I stand making a very similar venture. ...There is... a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. ~ William James, Pragmatism (1907)

416:These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical—yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll’s clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, “I’m not going home tonight; I’m going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green.” Not at Lewis Carroll’s level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction. I also was enamored of the rhythmic poetry of e. e. cummings, and a tantalizing quote from one of his recorded lectures stayed in my head. When asked why he became a poet, he said, “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” The line, with its intriguing reference to comedy, was enigmatic, and it took me ten years to work out its meaning. ~ Steve Martin

417:Blavatsky’s new Scripture, Isis Unveiled (1877), was written by invisible Spirit hands. Half a million words long, it began by denouncing the scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, and went on to expound its key doctrine, namely that all wisdom is One, that science is not opposed to religion, and that religious differences are man-made. Anyone who has nursed the thought that ‘deep down all religions are saying the same thing’ is more than halfway towards Theosophy. It appealed, said Peter Washington somewhat dismissively in his Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, to: the world of autodidacts, penny newspapers, weekly encyclopedias, evening classes, public lectures, workers’ educational institutes, debating unions, libraries of popular classics, socialist societies and art clubs – that bustling, earnest world where the readers of Ruskin and Edward Carpenter could improve themselves, where middle-class idealists could help them to do so, and where nudism and dietary reform linked arms with universal brotherhood and occult wisdom.7 ~ A N Wilson

418:Olo, Remi, Kwuga, Nur, Anajama, Rhoden. Only Olo and Remi were in my group. Everyone else I met in the dining area or the learning room where various lectures were held by professors onboard the ship. They were all girls who grew up in sprawling houses, who’d never walked through the desert, who’d never stepped on a snake in the dry grass. They were girls who could not stand the rays of Earth’s sun unless it was shining through a tinted window. Yet they were girls who knew what I meant when I spoke of “treeing.” We sat in my room (because, having so few travel items, mine was the emptiest) and challenged each other to look out at the stars and imagine the most complex equation and then split it in half and then in half again and again. When you do math fractals long enough, you kick yourself into treeing just enough to get lost in the shallows of the mathematical sea. None of us would have made it into the university if we couldn’t tree, but it’s not easy. We were the best and we pushed each other to get closer to “God. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

419:There are so many hammocks to catch you if you fall, so many laws to keep you from experience. All these cities I have been in the last few weeks make me fully understand the cozy, stifling state in which most people pass through life. I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup. ~ Henry Rollins

420:Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: “When the individual feels, the community reels”; or “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” or, as the crowning statement: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption. ~ Erich Fromm

421:You don't know the books I've struggled over, the lectures I've sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish. I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to hdp you and share with you-and now you've shut me out of your life." As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her. She was crying silendy as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become. She was terrified of me. The ice had broken betWeen us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea. She was right in refusing to torture herself by being with me. We no longer had anything in common. Simple conversation had become strained. And all there was between us now was the embarrassed silence and unsatisfied longing in a darkened room. ~ Daniel Keyes

422:A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. “What do you think?” he demanded impetuously. “About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. “About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.” “The books?” He nodded. “Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and — Here! Lemme show you.” Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.” “See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

423:We must encourage [each other] once we have grasped the basic points to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grown. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting no more and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind. ~ Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures.

424:If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~ Clarence Darrow

425:/Farsi There is great joy in darkness. Deepen it. Blushing embarrassments in the half-light confuse, but a scorched, blackened, face can laugh like an Ethiopian, or a candled moth, coming closer to God. Brighter than any moon, Bilal, Muhammed's Black Friend, shadowed him on the night journey. Keep your deepest secret hidden in the dark beneath daylight's uncovering and night's spreading veil. Whatever's given you by those two is for your desires. They poison, eventually. Deeper down, where your face gets erased, where life-water runs silently, there's a prison with no food and drink, and no moral instruction, that opens on a garden where there's only God. No self, only the creation-word, BE. You, listening to me, roll up the carpet of time and space. Step beyond, into the one word. In blindness, receive what I say. Take "There is no good..." for your wealth and your strength. Let "There is nothing..." be a love-wisdom in your wine. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks ~ Hakim Sanai, The Good Darkness

426:Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat. It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking. It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal. ~ Ana s Nin

427:If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~ Clarence Darrow Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (13 July 1925)

428:She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be. Why was it that in planetarium lectures the telescopic photographs flashed upon the interior of the dome were so familiar—not just to her, but to everyone. Farmers and children, and, once, Paumanuk Indians pausing in their sad race to extinction, had all understood the sharp abstract images, immediately and from the heart. The nebulae, the sweep of galaxies, the centrifugal clusters—nothing more, really, than projected electric light on a plaster ceiling—carried them away in a trance, and the planetarium lecturer need not have said a word. And why was it that certain sounds, frequencies, and repetitious rhythmic patterns suggested stars, floating galaxies, and even the colorful opaque planets orbiting in subdued ellipses? Why were certain pieces of music (pre-Galilean, post-Galilean, it did not matter) harmonically and rhythmically linked to the stars and suggestive of the parallel light that rained upon the earth in illusory radiants bursting apart? She had no explanation for these or a hundred other questions about the same matters. ~ Mark Helprin

429:His speeches were long and loud: praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn, vilifications of “disloyal factions,” discussions of the “integrity of the Kingdom’s borders,” lectures in history and ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation. He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige. Had Karhide lost so much prestige in the Sinoth Valley business that the subject could not be brought up? No; for he often talked about the Sinoth Valley. I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something that the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization. ~ Ursula K Le Guin

430:You mentioned earlier that if I wanted to help, Miss Oliviera, I should save the lectures, and help,” Mr. Smith said as he sprayed. “Perhaps that’s exactly what Fates do.” I shook my head, bewildered. “I’m sorry?” “Perhaps Fates are people like us…ordinary souls who’ve found themselves caught up in the battle between good and evil, and have chosen to take a stand and help do what’s right.” Mr. Smith was lecturing again, but this time the speech seemed to be directed at John, too. His tone was kindly, however. “Maybe that’s why John’s fingerprints aren’t in the Isla Heusos Police Department database, and why no one will find his footsteps here. Small things that take just a moment to do, yes, but that could add up, in the end, to make an enormous difference to someone. What do you say to that, Miss Oliviera?” “I…I don’t know,” I said. I was confused. I supposed he was right, though. This could certainly explain how John was able to drift like a ghost in and out of the Isla Heusos Cemetery-and my various schools-leaving behind no trace, except rumors and the faintest images on video, and broken padlocks and chains. ~ Meg Cabot

431:Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction. ~ Geoffrey Miller

432:...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me? But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out. ...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ... ...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches." -Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927. ~ Dorothy Parker

433:Innovative learners are primarily interested in personal meaning. They need to have reasons for learning—ideally reasons that connect new information with personal experience and establish that information’s usefulness in daily life. Some of the many learning methods effective with this type of learner are cooperative learning, brainstorming, and integration of content areas. Analytic learners are primarily interested in acquiring facts in order to deepen their understanding of concepts and processes. They are capable of learning effectively from lectures and enjoy independent research, analysis of data, and hearing what “the experts” have to say. Commonsense learners are primarily interested in how things work; they want to “get in and try it.” Concrete, experiential learning activities work best for them—using manipulatives, hands-on tasks, kinesthetic experience, and so on. Dynamic learners are primarily interested in self-directed discovery. They rely heavily on their own intuition and seek to teach both themselves and others. Any type of independent study is effective for these learners. They also enjoy simulations, role-play, and games. ~ Chap Clark

434:What is wrong with the [tale of] Two Swords?" he asked, even more surprised. "Don't you care for it?" "There is too bloody much romance in it," she said curtly. Ah, well, here was the crux of it, apparently. "Don't you like romance?" he ventured. She looked as though she were trying to decide if she should weep or, as he had earlier predicted, stick him with whatever blade she could lay her, hand on. "I don't know," she said briskly. "I see," he said, though he didn't. He wished, absently, that he'd had at least one sister. He was very well versed in what constituted courtly behavior and appropriate formal wooing practices, thanks to his father's insistence on many such lectures delivered by a dour man whose only acquaintance with women had likely come from reading about them in a book, but he had absolutely no idea how to proceed with a woman whose first instinct when faced with something that made her uncomfortable was to draw her sword. ... "I'll stop provoking you, but I will have the answer to a question. Why do you think most men woo?" "Because they have no sword skill and need something with which to occupy their time? ~ Lynn Kurland

435:You've never seen my legs, Marcus. You don't know what you're talking about. And coming from a man who takes his pick of the most beautiful women in London as if he were sampling from a tin of bonbons-" "Are you implying that I'm some shallow fool who values a woman only for her appearance?" Aline was tempted to retract her charge in the interest of maintaining peace between them. But as she considered the last few women that Marcus had carried on with... "I'm sorry to say, Marcus, that each of your recent choice of companions- the last four or five, at least- displayed all the intelligence of a turnip. And yes, they were all quite beautiful, and I doubt that you were able to to have a sensible conversation with any of them for longer than five minutes." Marcus stood back and glared at her. "How does that pertain to what we were discussing?" "It illustrates the point that even you, one of the finest and most honorable men I've ever known, place great importance on physical attractiveness. And if I ever see you consort with a woman who is less than stunningly perfect, then perhaps I'll listen to your lectures on how appearance doesn't matter. ~ Lisa Kleypas

436:In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness. ~ Helen Macdonald

437:At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectuals had reached the very brink of death: They were worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And they were even deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie down. Dugout barracks had not yet been built. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? Or whimper about their ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a “seminar,” and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not—they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely—spoke of “unshameful death,” a priest academician—about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers—about something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, an electrical engineer—on the principles of the energetics of the future, and a Leningrad economist—on how the effort to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of new ideas. Timofeyev-Ressovsky himself talked about the principles of microphysics. From one session to the next, participants were missing—they were already in the morgue. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

438:There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American". ~ Arthur M Schlesinger Jr

439:Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D Barrow

440:After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would say—weeping, shaking, or dry eyed—that he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again. I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born. I was quiet most of the time, until I was told I was evasive and not making progress. But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Do you want to share anything, I was prompted when I had little to offer. By then I felt my hope had run out. I saw the revolving door admitting new people and letting old people out into the world; similar stories were told with the same remorse and despair; the lectures were on the third repeat. What if I were stuck forever in that basement room? I broke down and could feel a collective sigh: my tears seemed to prove that finally I intended to cooperate. I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury. ~ Yiyun Li

441:Returning From Greece Well, we're nearly there, Hermippos. Day after tomorrow, it seems - that's what the captain said. At least we're sailing our seas, the waters of our own countries - Cyprus, Syria, Egypt waters we know and love. Why so silent? Ask your heart: didn't you too feel happier the further we got from Greece? What's the point of fooling ourselves? That wouldn't be properly Greek, would it? It's time we admitted the truth: we're Greeks also - what else are we?but with Asiatic tastes and feelings, tastes and feelings sometimes alien to Hellenism. It isn't correct, Hermippos, for us philosophers to be like some of our petty kings (remember how we laughed at them when they used to come to our lectures?) who through their showy Hellenified exteriors (Macedonian exteriors, naturally) let a bit of Arabia peep out now and then, a bit of Media they can't keep back. And to what laughable lengths the fools went trying to cover it up! No, that's not at all correct for us. For Greeks like us that kind of pettiness won't do. We simply can't be ashamed of the Syrian and Egyptian blood in our veins; we should really honour it, delight in it. ~ Constantine P. Cavafy

442:He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, in which brilliant perceptions were scattered in a wilderness of words. As he wrote on another occasion, "The lake babbled not less, and the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not." This strangely contorted and convoluted style also characterizes his verses, most of which were appended as commentaries upon his paintings. Like Blake, whose prophetic books bring words and images in exalted combination, Turner wished to make a complete statement. Like Blake, he seemed to consider the poet's role as being in part prophetic. His was a voice calling in the wilderness, and, perhaps secretly, he had an elevated sense of his status and his vocation. And like Blake, too, he was often considered to be mad. He lacked, however, the poetic genius of Blake - compensated perhaps by the fact that by general agreement he is the greater artist. ~ Peter Ackroyd

443:Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently… PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford. HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn’t know what a logarithm was. He’s read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who’s met him seems to fear, he doesn’t want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god. HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding. DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father. PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what’s going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time. DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken. DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while. Presenting: HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY You ain’t guessin’ where this one’s going. ~ Anonymous

444:The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city’s southern limits. I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales—and poets searching for rhymes in history’s junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn’t our own. Still our country wasn’t our own. ~ Jasmin Darznik

445:The Gap Instinct The gap instinct is very strong. The first time I lectured to the staff of the World Bank was in 1999. I told them the labels “developing” and “developed” were no longer valid and I swallowed my sword. It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 more of my lectures before it finally announced publicly that it was dropping the terms “developing” and “developed” and would from now on divide the world into four income groups. The UN and most other global organizations have still not made this change. So why is the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor so hard to change? I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time. Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives. Journalists are storytellers. So are people who produce documentaries and movies. ~ Hans Rosling

446:There are two kinds of learning, from the inside and from the outside. The fist is regarded as the best, or even the only kind. And so people learn through distant journeys, watching, reading, universities and lectures — they learn from what is happening outside them. Man is a stupid creature who had to learn. So he tacks knowledge onto himself, he gathers it like a bee, gaining more and more of it, putting it to use and processing it. But the thing inside that is "stupid" and needs learning doesn't change. Cornspike learned by absorbing things from the outside to the inside. Knowledge that is only grown on the outside changes nothing inside a man, or merely changes him on the surface, as one garment is changed for another. But he who learns by taking things inside himself undergoes constant transformation, because he incorporates what he learns into his being. So by taking the stinking, dirty peasants from Primeval and the district into herself, Cornspike became just like them, was drunk just like them, frightened by the war just like them, and aroused just like them. What's more, by taking them into herself in the bushes behind the inn, Cornspike also took in their wives, their children, and their stuffy, stinking wooden cottages around Maybug Hill. In a way she took the entire village into herself, every pain in the village, and every hope. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

447:I suppose that many think we live in a cheap and sensational age, all sky-signs and headlines; an age of advertisement and standardization. And yet, this is a more enlightened age than any human beings have lived in hitherto. For instance, practically all of us can read. Some of you may say: ‘Ah! But what? Detective stories, scandals, and the sporting news.’ No doubt, compared with Sunday newspapers and mystery stories, the Oedipus, Hamlet and Faust are very small beer. All the same, the number of volumes issued each year continually gains on the number of the population in all Western countries. Every phase and question of life is brought more and more into the limelight. Theatres, cinemas, the radio, and even lectures, assist the process. But they do not, and should not replace reading, because when we are just watching and listening, somebody is taking very good care that we should not stop and think. The danger in this age is not of our remaining ignorant; it is that we should lose the power of thinking for ourselves. Problems are more and more put before us, but, except to crossword puzzles and detective mysteries, do we attempt to find the answers for ourselves? Less and less. The short cut seems ever more and more desirable. But the short cut to knowledge is nearly always the longest way round. There is nothing like knowledge, picked up by or reasoned out for oneself. ~ John Galsworthy

448:It wasn't, [Nancy] grasped, so much that he was a dirty little man as that he probably felt she was inaccessible to him and was therefore determined to find fault with her. Being a singularly lovely girl, she was in fact used the the type, having suffered considerably at their hands at university. And Jake, more than anything, reminded her of those insufferably bright boys on campus, self-declared intellectuals, usually Jewish, charged with bombast and abominable poetry in lower-case letters, who were aroused by her presence, and yet were too gauche (and terrified) to speak out and actually ask for a date. Instead they sat at the table next to her in the student union, aggressively calling attention to themselves. Speculating loudly on what they took to be her icy manner. Or they slid belligerently into the seat next to her at lectures, trying to bedazzle with their questions. They also ridiculed her to girls less happily endowed, wreaking vengeance for a rejection they anticipated, but were too cowardly to risk, and bandied suggestions about her secret sexual life sufficiently coarse to make her dry. No matter that she took immense pains not to be provocative, swimming in sloppy joe sweaters, sensible skirts, and flat shoes. Going out of her way to discourage boys the other girls coveted. For this only proved that Nancy Croft was remote; splendidly made, yest, but glacier-like. ~ Mordecai Richler

449:Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy. ~ Salman Khan

450:Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are objectively available, but also options that are subjectively available―like, how are people allowed to think, how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society―not because we're incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That's what indoctrination is about in the first place, in fact―and I don't mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a "proper" life and a "proper" set of values are, and that's all indoctrination. So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to people―both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that's one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the "choices" forced on them by some arbitrary system of power. ~ Noam Chomsky

451:Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently... PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford. HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm was. He's read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who's met him seems to fear, he doesn't want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god. HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding. DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father. PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what's going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time. DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken. DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while. Presenting: HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY You ain't guessin' where this one's going. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

452:Instead, he (and Epictetus and Seneca) focused on a series of questions not unlike the ones we continue to ask ourselves today: “What is the best way to live?” “What do I do about my anger?” “What are my obligations to my fellow human beings?” “I’m afraid to die; why is that?” “How can I deal with the difficult situations I face?” “How should I handle the success or power I hold?” These weren’t abstract questions. In their writings—often private letters or diaries—and in their lectures, the Stoics struggled to come up with real, actionable answers. They ultimately framed their work around a series of exercises in three critical disciplines: The Discipline of Perception (how we see and perceive the world around us) The Discipline of Action (the decisions and actions we take—and to what end) The Discipline of Will (how we deal with the things we cannot change, attain clear and convincing judgment, and come to a true understanding of our place in the world) By controlling our perceptions, the Stoics tell us, we can find mental clarity. In directing our actions properly and justly, we’ll be effective. In utilizing and aligning our will, we will find the wisdom and perspective to deal with anything the world puts before us. It was their belief that by strengthening themselves and their fellow citizens in these disciplines, they could cultivate resilience, purpose, and even joy. Born in the tumultuous ancient world, ~ Ryan Holiday

453:I don’t think Kashmiriyat is dead, nor is Sufism. If we don’t support the idea of Kashmiriyat or the Sufi tradition, it will fade out eventually, because radicalism is increasing. Sheikh Saheb was said to be a pure Musalman but he kept the Jamaat-e-Islami at bay, telling them they were not going to meddle in political life. After him, Farooq was the same way and in fact more aggressive about it, saying that they should close down all the Jamaat schools and that if Delhi funded the state, it would set up its own schools. But he did not get that much support. This is getting compromised. If you don’t do anything about Kashmir, then more and more Wahhabism will come in, as petro-dollars, etc., with their mosques growing and the lectures from their mosques increasing. A couple of years ago I was leaving Srinagar on a Friday and I was startled. Every road I passed had a loudspeaker blaring for the jumme ka namaaz. This never happened earlier. To my surprise, one of the breeding grounds of the fast-spreading radicalism is the Srinagar jail. A Kashmiri who was detained twice under the Public Security Act told me that the atmosphere of radicalism was so suffocating that you felt that you were in a jail inside a jail. So long as the likes of Masarat Alam and Qasim Fakhtoo are given free rein radicalism will grow. While Pakistan remains a factor in Kashmir, the real danger is that radicalism will end up as the lasting political legacy of Kashmir. ~ A S Dulat

454:At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies. Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ. Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind? When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth. ~ Robert G Ingersoll

455:While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others. Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: “When the individual feels, the community reels”; or “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” or, as the crowning statement: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. ~ Erich Fromm

456:People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary, but bizarre. He remembered with what excitement he had listened, at the age of twenty, to the Reith Lectures delivered on BBC Radio by Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist and interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, a year earlier, had succeeded Noel Annan as provost of King’s. “Far from being the basis of the good society,” Leach had said, “the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Yes! he thought. Yes! That is a thing I also know. The families in the novels he later wrote would be explosive, operatic, arm-waving, exclamatory, wild. People who did not like his books would sometimes criticize these fictional families for being unrealistic—not “ordinary” enough. However, readers who did like his books said to him, “Those families are exactly like my family. ~ Salman Rushdie

457:During one of these lectures, our teacher imparted a morsel of clinical wisdom. This is what he told us: “You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will be able to help.” At this point my teacher raised his voice as he said, “Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him.” Many years later I learned that the teacher had warned us against psychopathic charm, and the leading authority in the study of psychopathy confirmed that the teacher’s advice was sound. The analogy to the Müller-Lyer illusion is close. What we were being taught was not how to feel about that patient. Our teacher took it for granted that the sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1. Furthermore, we were not being taught to be generally suspicious of our feelings about patients. We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign—like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it. ~ Daniel Kahneman

458:Vladimir Nabokov “... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature ~ Vladimir Nabokov

459:Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone. ~ Bren Brown

460:Poor Superman is about a married man who, much to his own surprise, enters into a passionate love affair—with another man. The experimental theatre which hosted the play here is a small place, and we happened to wind up sitting in the front row. Practically on the stage. The actors were often within a few feet of us. So, during the big love scene, when the two male leads start passionately stroking and kissing each other’s stark naked bodies... and doing this so close to me that I could have touched them both with only a little effort... I sat there in mute panic, thinking, “Please don’t either of you fellows get an erection. Just don’t. Should I look away? Should I close my eyes? Should I just keep watching as if I’m not obsessing about your genitals? Aren’t you done kissing and touching yet? Because if this goes on any longer, one of you could have an involuntary reaction, if you get my drift! And I am a total stranger sitting within four damn feet of you, in case you hadn’t NOTICED!” Though my seat wasn’t as dark as usual, the writing lesson was very memorable: Don’t ever pull your reader out of the frame. Bad research. Anachronistic writing. Self-serving polemics and lectures barely disguised as narrative. Incongruity and lack of continuity. Weak characterization, leaden pacing, lack of motivation, stiff dialogue, lazy plotting... There are a thousand ways for novelist to wind up naked onstage while an appalled audience obsesses about her exposed genitals at a critical moment. ~ Laura Resnick

461:/Farsi When the path ignites a soul, there's no remaining in place. The foot touches ground, but not for long. The way where love tells its secret stays always in motion, and there is no you there, and no reason. The rider urges his horse to gallop, and so doing, throws himself under the flying hooves. In love-unity there's no old or new. Everything is nothing. God alone is. For lovers the phenomena-veil is very transparent, and the delicate tracings on it cannot be explained with language. Clouds burn off as the sun rises, and the love-world floods with light. But cloud-water can be obscuring, as well as useful. There is an affection that covers the glory, rather than dissolving into it. It's a subtle difference, like the change in Persian from the word "friendship" to the word "work." That happens with just a dot above or below the third letter. There is a seeing of the beauty of union that doesn't actively work for the inner conversation. Your hand and feet must move, as a stream streams, working as its Self, to get to the ocean. Then there's no more mention of the search. Being famous, or being a disgrace, who's ahead or behind, these considerations are rocks and clogged places that slow you. Be as naked as a wheat grain out of its husk and sleek as Adam. Don't ask for anything other than the presence. Don't speak of a "you" apart from That. A full container cannot be more full. Be whole, and nothing. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks ~ Hakim Sanai, Streaming

462:Dear Mama, I hope this letter finds you well. It contains all my love and affection. (It also contains all my questions about how you could ever have loved a man like Professor Miller.) You asked about where I live. I cannot believe I haven’t mentioned it, but I suppose I’m so used to it now I don’t think of it. The dorms are small and plain, but as a student I don’t need much more. (I cannot afford the dorms. I do not live in them.) The food is dreadful, all heavy meat and sauce. I miss fruit! (I am always hungry; a supper with a strange man was the fullest my stomach has been since I got here.) As I have mentioned in every letter, my professors are all interesting and I take copious notes during lectures. (If you do not bring up my father, I am certainly not going to offer you information on that louse of a man.) The course work is challenging but I am excelling. (I have to be perfect so they can find no excuse to dock my grades.) I have delivered Aunt Nani’s package to Jacabo. He was so happy to receive it, and I take tea with him once a week. It is a great comfort to speak Melenese with someone. (I live in the hotel where Jacabo works. He saved me when I realized I could not afford room and board at the school. I work long, hard hours in the evenings to earn a tiny hole of a servant’s room and whatever scraps of food are left over.) Please give everyone my love and tell them how much I am learning to bring back to the island as a teacher. (I will not fail, and I will use everything I learn here to make Melei better.) Your affectionate daughter, Jessamin ~ Kiersten White

463:The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him, as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other. Where the masters, however, really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs. No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given. Force and restraint may, no doubt, be in some degree requisite in order to oblige children, or very young boys, to attend to those parts of education which it is thought necessary for them to acquire during that early period of life; but after twelve or thirteen years of age, provided the master does his duty, force or restraint can scarce ever be necessary to carry on any part of education. Such is the generosity of the greater part of young men, that, so far from being disposed to neglect or despise the instructions of their master, provided he shows some serious intention of being of use to them, they are generally inclined to pardon a great deal of incorrectness in the performance of his duty, and sometimes even to conceal from the public a good deal of gross negligence. ~ Adam Smith

464:The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to portray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of Königsberg, an old town on the north-eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time, and the neighbors knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight-fitting coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue called after him to this day the "Philosopher's Walk." Summer and winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain, the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudging anxiously behind Kant with a big umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. What a strange contrast did this man's outward life present to his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts! In sooth, had the citizens of Königsberg had the least presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt far more awful dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but kill the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him. ~ Heinrich Heine

465:Work For Woman Woman, sitting at your ease, In the midst of luxuries, Bound by chains of selfishness, With no aim but 'how to dress,' Does the thought ne'er come to you Of the thing that you could do? Could, and yet do not, To crush out the liquor trade, That is making, and has made, Sin and shame, and woe and tears In our land, for years and yearsHave you never thought? You will chat for hours and hours Over ribbons, silks, and flowers, But you will not talk or think Of this growing evil-drink. You will weep and smile and laugh Over trashy books of chaff, But you will not read Any truthful temperance tale. 'They are all so dry and staleJust the same old thing,' you say As you yawn, and turn away From the truths you need. You have time for rout, and ball, Concert, theatre, and all Lectures, save on this one theme. 'Oh! these temperance lectures seem So extremely dull,' you cry, With a listless air and eye. O my friend! forsake That absorbing theme of DRESS, Drop for once your selfishness, Think of all there is to do! See the work that waits for you! 931 Up! arouse! awake! There are men for you to save From the wretched drunkard's grave. There are feet that strayed away Into paths of sin one day. You can bring them, if you will, To the paths upon the hill. There's enough to do! There's much to do and little done, Women, sisters, every one, Lend a helping hand, nor shirk Any part of God's great work. Come! we've need of you! ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

466:In a more consistent and sustained way, I think, intellectuals who are close to policy formulation and can control patronage of the kind that gives or withholds jobs, stipends, promotions tend to watch out for individuals who do not toe the line professionally and in the eyes of their superiors gradually come to exude an air of controversy and noncooperation. Understandably of course, if you want a job done—let us say that you and your team have to provide the State Department or Foreign Office with a policy paper on Bosnia by next week—you need to surround yourself with people who are loyal, share the same assumptions, speak the same language. I have always felt that for an intellectual who represents the kinds of things I have been discussing in these lectures, being in that sort of professional position, where you are principally serving and winning rewards from power, is not at all conducive to the exercise of that critical and relatively independent spirit of analysis and judgment that, from my point of view, ought to be the intellectual’s contribution. In other words, the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of a government or a large corporation, or even a guild of likeminded professionals. In such situations the temptations to turn off one’s moral sense, or to think entirely from within the specialty, or to curtail skepticism in favor of conformity are far too great to be trusted. Many intellectuals succumb completely to these temptations, and to some degree all of us do. No one is totally self-supporting, not even the greatest of free spirits. ~ Edward W Said

467:Bums at Breakfast Daily, the bums sat down to eat in our kitchen. They seemed to be whatever the day was like: If it was hot or cold, they were hot or cold; If it was wet, they came in dripping wet. One left his snowy shoes on the back porch But his socks stuck to the clean linoleum, And one, when my mother led him to the sink, Wrung out his hat instead of washing his hands. My father said they'd made a mark on the house, A hobo's sign on the sidewalk, pointing the way. I hunted everywhere, but never found it. It must have said, 'It's only good in the morningWhen the husband's out.' My father knew by heart Lectures on Thrift and Doggedness, But he was always either working or sleeping. My mother didn't know any advice. They ate their food politely, with old hands, Not looking around, and spoke in short, plain answers. Sometimes they said what they'd been doing lately Or told us what was wrong; but listening hard, I broke their language into secret codes: Their east meant west, their job meant walking and walking, Their money meant danger, home meant running and hiding, Their father and mother were different kinds of weather. Dumbly, I watched them leave by the back door, Their pockets empty as a ten-year-old's; Yet they looked twice as rich, being full of breakfast. I carried mine like a lump all the way to school. When I was growing hungry, where would they be? None ever came twice. Never to lunch or dinner. They were always starting fresh in the fresh morning. I dreamed of days that stopped at the beginning. ~ David Wagoner

468:Three things make people want to change. One is that they hurt sufficiently. They have beat their heads against the same wall so long that they decide they have had enough. They have invested in the same slot machines without a pay-off for so long that they finally are willing either to stop playing, or to move on to others. Their migraines hurt, their ulcers bleed. They are alcoholic. They have hit the bottom. They beg for relief. They want to change. Another thing that makes people want to change is a slow type of despair called ennui, or boredom. This is what the person has who goes through life saying, "So what?" until he finally asks the ultimate big "So What?" He is ready to change. A third thing that makes people want to change is the sudden discovery that they can. This has been an observable effect of Transactional Analysis. Many people who have shown no particular desire to change have been exposed to Transactional Analysis through lectures or by hearing about it from someone else. This knowledge has produced an excitement about new possibilities, which has led to their further inquiry and a growing desire to change. There is also the type of patient who, although suffering from disabling symptoms, still does not really want to change. His treatment contract reads, "I'll promise to let you help me if I don't have to get well." This negative attitude changes, however, as the patient begins to see that there is indeed another way to live. A working knowledge of P-A-C makes it possible for the Adult to explore new and exciting frontiers of life, a desire which has been there all along but has been buried under the burden of the NOT OK. ~ Thomas A Harris

469:Breitmann In La Sorbonne DER Breitmann sits in la Sorbonne, A note-pook in his hand, 'Tvas dere he vent to lectures, Und in oldt Louis le Grand. Id's more ash two und dwendy years Since here I used mein pen; Oh, where ish all de characders, Dat I hafe known since denn? Der cratest boet efer vas, Der pest I efer known, Vent lecdures here, too, shoost like me, Le Sieur Francoys Villon. He raise de teufel all arount, He hear de Sorbonne chime; Crate shpirid ender in mein heart, Und mofe mein soul to rhyme. BALADE. Dictes moy - in what shpirit land Ish Clara Lafontaine? Or Pomare, or La Frisette, Who blazed on soosh a train? Shveet Echo flings de quesdion pack, O'er lake or shdreamlet lone; All eartly peauty fades afay, Vhere ish dem lofed ones gone? Oh, vhere ish Lola Montez now, So loved in efery land? How oft I shmoked dose cigarettes She rollt mit vairy hand! Dat mighdy soul, dat shplendit brick, A saint's pecome to be, For mit soosh saints der Breitmann make His Hagiologie. 74 Und vhere ish La Pochardinette? Ish she too mit de dead? She loafed de Latin Quarter mit A hat und fedder on her het. Lebe wohl petite Pochardinette! Qui ne safait refuser, Ni la ponche a la bleine ferre, Ni sa pouche a un paiser. O Prince! dese quesdions all are nix, I sit here all alone, Mit von refrain to end de shdrain, Vhere ish mein lofed vons gone? Vhen Marcovitch has cut und run, Und Schneider's off de ving, Some cray old reprobate like me Vill of dese lofed vons sing. ~ Charles Godfrey Leland

470:There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology. where she is not maligned she is magnificently condescended to, as in this diary entry by Somerset Maugham written when he was in medical school: The Professor of Gynaecology: He began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity. I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence. Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not be despised so much. were she sexually loved, or even liked, she and what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light, she would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contempt for her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible; immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is not just less; she and the sex she incarnates are a species of filth. God will not help of course: "For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit. ~ Andrea Dworkin

471:After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.” At ~ Walter Isaacson

472:science reading list :::    1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie    3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)    4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)    5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)    6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)    7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)    8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916)    9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)    10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947)    11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (1968)    12. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger (1944)    13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973)    14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson (1971)    15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977)    16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)    17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)    18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)    19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814)    20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963)    21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948)    22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983)    23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943)    24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke (1665)    25. Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)    ~ Editors of Discovery Magazine, Website,

473:The quality of students wasn’t an issue; Tsinghua and nearby Peking University attracted the highest-scoring students from each year’s national examinations. But the SEM’s curriculum and teaching methods were dated, and new faculty members were needed. To be a world-class school required world-class professors, but many instructors, holdovers from a bygone era, knew little about markets or modern business practices. The school’s teaching was largely confined to economic theory, which wasn’t very practical. China needed corporate leaders, not Marxist theoreticians, and Tsinghua’s curriculum placed too little emphasis on such critical areas as finance, marketing, strategy, and organization. The way I see it, a business education should be as much vocational as academic. Teaching business is like teaching medicine: theory is important, but hands-on practice is essential. Medical students learn from cadavers and hospital rounds; business students learn from case studies—a method pioneered more than a century ago by Harvard Business School that engages students in analyzing complex real-life dilemmas faced by actual companies and executives. Tsinghua’s method of instruction, like too much of China’s educational system, relied on rote learning—lectures, memorization, and written tests—and did not foster innovative, interactive approaches to problem solving. Students needed to know how to work as part of a team—a critical lesson in China, where getting people to work collaboratively can be difficult. At Harvard Business School we weren’t told the “right” or “wrong” answers but were encouraged to think for ourselves and defend our ideas before our peers and our at-times-intimidating professors. This helped hone my analytical skills and confidence, and I believed a similar approach would help Chinese students. ~ Anonymous

474:Quiller-Couch was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge. “Just what I need!” I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag: Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed that his students—including me—had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the “Invocation to Light” in Book 9. So I said, “Wait here,” and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: Milton assumed I’d read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I’d been reared in Judaism I hadn’t. So I said, “Wait here,” and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays of Shakespeare, and Boswell’s Johnson, but also the Second book of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it’s in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed. So what with one thing and another and an average of three “Wait here’s” a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q’s five books of lectures. ~ Helene Hanff

475:Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge. "Just what I need!" I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag: Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed his students − including me − had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the "Invocation to Light" in Book 9. So I said, "Wait here," and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, "Wait here," and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays by Shakespeare, and Boswell's Johnson, but also the Second books of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it's in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed. So what with one thing and another and an average of three "Wait here's" a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q's five books of lectures. ~ Helene Hanff

476:Also by Alan Watts The Spirit of Zen (1936) The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937) The Meaning of Happiness (1940) The Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius (1944) (translation) Behold the Spirit (1948) Easter: Its Story and Meaning (1950) The Supreme Identity (1950) The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) Myth and Ritual in Christianity (1953) The Way of Zen (1957) Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) “This Is It” and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960) Psychotherapy East and West (1961) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (1963) Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship (1964) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) Nonsense (1967) Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality (1970) Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak (1971) The Art of Contemplation (1972) In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 (1972) Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal (1973) Posthumous Publications Tao: The Watercourse Way (unfinished at the time of his death in 1973, published in 1975) The Essence of Alan Watts (1974) Essential Alan Watts (1976) Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life (1978) Om: Creative Meditations (1979) Play to Live (1982) Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self (1983) Out of the Trap (1985) Diamond Web (1986) The Early Writings of Alan Watts (1987) The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings (1990) Talking Zen (1994) Become Who You Are (1995) Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion (1995) The Philosophies of Asia (1995) The Tao of Philosophy (1995) Myth and Religion (1996) Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking (1997) Zen and the Beat Way (1997) Culture of Counterculture (1998) Eastern Wisdom: What Is Zen?, What Is Tao?, An Introduction to Meditation (2000) Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960–1969 (2006) ~ Alan W Watts

477:#3: TO FEEL SUPPORTED, SUPPORT YOURSELF. During my lectures and workshops I often hear people complain that they’re not feeling supported by others. They might be upset with their work colleagues, families, or friends, but whatever the circumstances, they’ve all slipped into victim mode by resenting others for their lack of support. Rather than commiserate with these folks, I flash the universal mirror at them and ask, “Are you supporting yourself?” Typically they respond with a weepy reply of “No, I’m not.” You see, the way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us. If our thoughts and energy are not supportive, then our life won’t be supported. Therefore, we must take responsibility by consciously supporting ourselves in every given moment. Whenever you’re in a time of need and feel unsupported or alone, immediately ask yourself, “How can I support myself more?” Then take action. Simple right actions toward self-support can greatly change your attitude and experience. Say something kind to yourself, consciously think an empowering thought about yourself, or ask someone for help. We often think that people should be able to read our minds and simply “know” when we need support, but they can’t. The people in our lives have their own struggles and challenges, and they may not see ours, especially if we appear to be holding it together. Ultimately, asking for help is a radical act of self-support. One of the biggest ways we don’t support ourselves is by not asking for support. Asking can take courage, but the reward is immense. Not only will you receive the support you need, you’ll deepen your relationship with whomever you’re asking. These small right actions can greatly enhance your life in an instant. Making the simple shift from a powerless victim to a strong person who can care for yourself can change your life forever. Miracle Message #3: If I want to feel supported, I must support myself. #MiraclesNow ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

478:It wasn't the worst time when Melody left me," the Professor said. "The worst time was the years before. Because I didn't know I couldn't hate anybody that much; it was like she'd stuck a sword into me, one of those Japanese samurai swords, do you know the kind I mean? Heavy and razor sharp-and she'd stuck it in me and then she was...pushing it around." His hand rested on his stomach, remembering. "I couldn't get free from the feelings. I didn't know how frightened I could be, all the time. But whenever we had to go out together, she'd smile at me and talk to me and listen and look at me the way she did-and I wanted to hit her," he said, his voice low and ashamed. Jeff let his head down to rest on his fists. "When I found out how many lies she was telling me, I finally realized that she had always lied to me. About my lectures. About boyfriends; and even after she knew I knew, she'd still lie about it. I hated her. Or the bills she ran up, without asking, without telling; then she'd say she'd taken care of them but she just-ignore them. I know I looked all right to other people-maybe more of a dry stick than usual, maybe even more of boring than usual-but inside I was knotted up, all the time, because I hated her so much, and I hated myself, and I was scared." Jeff looked up at his father. "I didn't think she'd do that to you, Jeff," the Professor said. "But she did, didn't she." Jeff nodded. He knew he was crying, but he didn't know what to do about it. Neither did the Professor. He just sat and waited, until Jeff got up to blow his nose. "It was the lies," the Professor said. "They were what really scared me. Even now, if I think about her-and the kinds of things she says....I don't know what she told you, but I never was sorry I'd married her or loved her because of you. You always made a difference, made a real difference, from the very beginning. I always knew that, inside me, but I didn't bother to learn how to show you. I'm sorry, Jeff, I should have taken the trouble. ~ Cynthia Voigt

479:It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL. ~ John Steinbeck

480:Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is ex- pected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.' He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human rela- tions are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separate- ness cannot be overcome.Modern man is ac- tually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: "When the individual feels, the cornmunity reels"; or "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today," or, as the crowning statement : "Everybody is happy nowadays." Man's happiness today consists in "hav- ing fun." Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swalse lowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption. ~ Erich Fromm

481:The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

482:And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem. He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another—resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra. The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people’s noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple—banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks’ cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple’s many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked beak might come into his view now and then, never did he discover a nose like his own. And with each failure to find what he was looking for, the Naigu’s resentment would increase. It was entirely due to this feeling that often, while speaking to a person, he would unconsciously grasp the dangling end of his nose and blush like a youngster. And finally, the Naigu would comb the Buddhist scriptures and other classic texts, searching for a character with a nose like his own in the hope that it would provide him some measure of comfort. Nowhere, however, was it written that the nose of either Mokuren or Sharihotsu was long. And Ryūju and Memyoō, of course, were Bodhisattvas with normal human noses. Listening to a Chinese story once, he heard that Liu Bei, the Shu Han emperor, had long ears. “Oh, if only it had been his nose,” he thought, “how much better I would feel! ~ Ry nosuke Akutagawa

483:His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again? ~ John Lewis Gaddis

484:There are many things that men and women ought to think about, and must think about, in private, that they would not for a moment discuss in public. There are books on the proper conduct of women in certain most sacred relations of life, relations of life which are as holy as any, and which can be entered into in the presence of a holy God with no question of His approval, but which do not permit of public mention. . . . That the Bible is a pure book is evidenced by the fact that it is not a favourite book in dens of infamy. But on the other hand, books that try to make out that the Bible is an obscene book, and that endeavour to keep people from reading it, are favourite books in dens of infamy. The unclean classes, both men and women, were devoted admirers of the most brilliant man this country ever produced who attacked what he called the "obscenity of the Bible." These unclean classes do not frequent Bible classes. They do frequent infidel lectures. These infidel objectors to the book as an "obscene book" constantly betray their insincerity and hypocrisy. Colonel Ingersoll . . . objected to the Bible for telling these vile deeds "without a touch of humour." In other words, he did not object to telling stories of vice, if only a joke was made of the sin. Thank God, that is exactly what the Bible does not do--make a joke of sin. It makes sin hideous, so men who are obscene in their own hearts object to the Bible as being an obscene book. . . . To sum up, there are in the Bible descriptions of sins that cannot wisely be read in every public assembly, but these descriptions of sin are morally most wholesome in the places where God, the Author of the Book, manifestly intends them to be read. The child who is brought up to read the Bible as a whole, from Genesis to Revelation, will come to know in the very best way possible what a child ought to know very early in life if he is to be safeguarded against the perils that surround our modern life on every hand. A child who is brought up upon a constant, thorough, continuous reading of the whole Bible is more likely than any other child to be free from the vices that are undermining the mental, moral, and physical strength of our boys and girls, and young men and young women. But the child who is brought up on infidel literature and conversation is the easiest prey there is for the seducer and procuress. The next easiest is the one who, through neglect of the Bible, is left in ignorance of the awful pitfalls of life. ~ R A Torrey

485:Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible. As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in the dark. ~ Gene Wolfe

486:Cripples And Other Stories My doctor, the comedian I called you every time and made you laugh yourself when I wrote this silly rhyme... Each time I give lectures or gather in the grants you send me off to boarding school in training pants. God damn it, father-doctor, I'm really thirty-six. I see dead rats in the toilet. I'm one of the lunatics. Disgusted, mother put me on the potty. She was good at this. My father was fat on scotch. It leaked from every orifice. Oh the enemas of childhood, reeking of outhouses and shame! Yet you rock me in your arms and whisper my nickname. Or else you hold my hand and teach me love too late. And that's the hand of the arm they tried to amputate. Though I was almost seven I was an awful brat. I put it in the Easy Wringer. It came out nice and flat. I was an instant cripple from my finger to my shoulder. The laundress wept and swooned. 52 My mother had to hold her. I know I was a cripple. Of course, I'd known it from the start. My father took the crowbar and broke the wringer's heart. The surgeons shook their heads. They really didn't knowWould the cripple inside of me be a cripple that would show? My father was a perfect man, clean and rich and fat. My mother was a brilliant thing. She was good at that. You hold me in your arms. How strange that you're so tender! Child-woman that I am, you think that you can mend her. As for the arm, unfortunately it grew. Though mother said a withered arm would put me in Who's Who. For years she has described it. She sang it like a hymn. By then she loved the shrunken thing, my little withered limb. My father's cells clicked each night, intent on making money. And as for my cells, they brooded, little queens, on honey. Oh boys too, as a matter of fact, and cigarettes and cars. Mother frowned at my wasted life. My father smoked cigars. 53 My cheeks blossomed with maggots. I picked at them like pearls. I covered them with pancake. I wound my hair in curls. My father didn't know me but you kiss me in my fever. My mother knew me twice and then I had to leave her. But those are just two stories and I have more to tell from the outhouse, the greenhouse where you draw me out of hell. Father, I am thirty-six, yet I lie here in your crib. I'm getting born again, Adam, as you prod me with your rib. ~ Anne Sexton

487:Australia Today 1916 They came from the lower levels Deep down in the Brilliant mine; From the wastes where the whirlwind revels, Whirling the leaves of pine. On the western plains, where the Darling flows, And the dust storms wheel and shift, The teamster loosened his yokes and bows, And turned his team adrift. On the western stations, far and wide, There's many an empty pen, For the "ringers" have cast the machines aside And answered the call for men. On the lucerne flats where the stream runs slow, And the Hunter finds the sea, The women are driving the mowers now, With the children at their knee. For the men have gone, as a man must go, At the call of the rolling drums; For the men have sworn that the Turks shall know When the old battalion comes. Column of companies by the right, Steady in strong array, With the sun on the bayonets gleaming bright, The battalion marched away. They battled, the old battalion, Through the toil of the training camps, Sweated and strove at lectures, By the light of the stinking lamps. Marching, shooting, and drilling; Steady and slow and stern; Awkward and strange, but willing All of their job to learn. 65 Learning to use the rifle; Learning to use the spade; Deeming fatigue a trifle During each long parade. Till at last they welded Into a concrete whole, And there grew in the old battalion A kind of battalion's soul. Brotherhood never was like it; Friendship is not the word; But deep in that body of marching men The soul of a nation stirred. And like one man with a single thought Cheery and confident; Ready for all that the future brought, The old battalion went. Column of companies by the right, Steady in strong array, With the sun on the bayonets gleaming bright, The battalion marched away. How shall we tell of the landing By the hills where the foe were spread, And the track of the old battalion Was marked by the Turkish dead? With the dash that discipline teaches, Though the hail of the shrapnel flew, And the forts were raking the beaches, And the toll of the dead men grew. They fixed their grip on the gaunt hillside With a pluck that has won them fame; And the home-folks know that the dead men died For the pride of Australia's name. Column of companies by the right, To the beat of the rolling drums; 66 With honours gained in a stirring fight The old battalion comes! ~ Banjo Paterson

488:Je me mis dès lors à lire avec avidité et bientôt la lecture fut ma passion. Tous mes nouveaux besoins, toutes mes aspirations récentes, tous les élans encore vagues de mon adolescence qui s’élevaient dans mon âme d’une façon si troublante et qui étaient provoqués par mon développement si précoce, tout cela, soudainement, se précipita dans une direction, parut se satisfaire complètement de ce nouvel aliment et trouver là son cours régulier. Bientôt mon cœur et ma tête se trouvèrent si charmés, bientôt ma fantaisie se développa si largement, que j’avais l’air d’oublier tout ce qui m’avait entourée jusqu’alors. Il semblait que le sort lui même m’arrêtât sur le seuil de la nouvelle vie dans laquelle je me jetais, à laquelle je pensais jour et nuit, et, avant de m’abandonner sur la route immense, me faisait gravir une hauteur d’où je pouvais contempler l’avenir dans un merveilleux panorama, sous une perspective brillante, ensorcelante. Je me voyais destinée à vivre tout cet avenir en l’apprenant d’abord par les livres ; de vivre dans les rêves, les espoirs, la douce émotion de mon esprit juvénile. Je commençai mes lectures sans aucun choix, par le premier livre qui me tomba sous la main. Mais, le destin veillait sur moi. Ce que j’avais appris et vécu jusqu’à ce jour était si noble, si austère, qu’une page impure ou mauvaise n’eût pu désormais me séduire. Mon instinct d’enfant, ma précocité, tout mon passé veillaient sur moi ; et maintenant ma conscience m’éclairait toute ma vie passée. En effet, presque chacune des pages que je lisais m’était déjà connue, semblait déjà vécue, comme si toutes ces passions, toute cette vie qui se dressaient devant moi sous des formes inattendues, en des tableaux merveilleux, je les avais déjà éprouvées. Et comment pouvais-je ne pas être entraînée jusqu’à l’oubli du présent, jusqu’à l’oubli de la réalité, quand, devant moi dans chaque livre que je lisais, se dressaient les lois d’une même destinée, le même esprit d’aventure qui règnent sur la vie de l’homme, mais qui découlent de la loi fondamentale de la vie humaine et sont la condition de son salut et de son bonheur ! C’est cette loi que je soupçonnais, que je tâchais de deviner par toutes mes forces, par tous mes instincts, puis presque par un sentiment de sauvegarde. On avait l’air de me prévenir, comme s’il y avait en mon âme quelque chose de prophétique, et chaque jour l’espoir grandissait, tandis qu’en même temps croissait de plus en plus mon désir de me jeter dans cet avenir, dans cette vie. Mais, comme je l’ai déjà dit, ma fantaisie l’emportait sur mon impatience, et, en vérité, je n’étais très hardie qu’en rêve ; dans la réalité, je demeurais instinctivement timide devant l’avenir. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

489:I didn’t think we were being quiet, particularly. High heels may have looked dainty, but they didn’t sound that way on a tile floor. Maybe it was just that my dad was so absorbed in the convo on his cell phone. For whatever reason, when we emerged from the kitchen into the den, he started, and he stuffed the phone down by his side in the cushions. I was sorry I’d startled him, but it really was comical to see this big blond manly man jump three feet off the sofa when he saw two teenage girls. I mean, it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Dad was a ferocious lawyer in court. Out of court, he was one of those Big Man on Campus types who shook hands with everybody from the mayor to the alleged ax murderer. A lot like Sean, actually. There were only two things Dad was afraid of. First, he wigged out when anything in the house was misplaced. I won’t even go into all the arguments we’d had about my room being a mess. They’d ended when I told him it was my room, and if he didn’t stop bugging me about it, I would put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers, maybe even hide some (cue horror movie music). No spoons for you! Second, he was easily startled, and very pissed off afterward. “Damn it, Lori!” he hollered. “It’s great to see you too, loving father. Lo, I have brought my friend Tammy to witness out domestic bliss. She’s on the tennis team with me.” Actually, I was on the tennis team with her. “Hello, Tammy. It’s nice to meet you,” Dad said without getting up or shaking her hand or anything else he would normally do. While the two of them recited a few more snippets of polite nonsense, I watched my dad. From the angle of his body, I could tell he was protecting that cell phone behind the cushions. I nodded toward the hiding place. “Hot date?” I was totally kidding. I didn’t expect him to say, “When?” So I said, “Ever.” And then I realized I’d brought up a subject that I didn’t want to bring up, especially not while I was busy being self-absorbed. I clapped my hands. “Okay, then! Tammy and I are going upstairs very loudly, and after a few minutes we will come back down, ringing a cowbell. Please continue with your top secret phone convo.” I turned and headed for the stairs. Tammy followed me. I thought Dad might order me back, send Tammy out, and give me one of those lectures about my attitude (who, me?). But obviously he was chatting with Pamela Anderson and couldn’t wait for me to leave the room. Behind us, I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. I’m still here. Lori came in. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.” “He seems jumpy,” Tammy whispered on the stairs. “Always,” I said. “Do you have a lot of explosions around your house?” I glanced at my watch. “Not this early. ~ Jennifer Echols

490:Now, in Scribner's window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book. I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: "Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur." The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside -- to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin -- a difficult, ancient and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition. That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson's book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear. Now, in light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. The result was that I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith. And that last thing was the most important of all. ~ Thomas Merton

491:She was sitting on a bench, her skirts bunched up on her thighs and her elbows resting on her knees as she tried to slow her breathing, when she heard a male voice. “Um, I think I should tell you I’m here.” Jane sat upright, quickly pulling her skirts back down to her ankles. She had been wearing drawers, of course, but it still felt absurdly immodest to sit that way in 1816 attire. She looked around, seeing no one. “Where are you?” she asked. Theodore, her dance partner of late, stood from behind the bush directly in front of her. His impressive height made it seem that he was slowly expanding while standing up, like stretched taffy. “What were you doing back there?” “I’m a gardener,” he said, raising the shovel and pick like a show of evidence. “I was just working here, I wasn’t trying to spy.” “You, uh, caught me there at an unladylike moment. Mrs. Wattlesbrook would probably box my ears.” “That’s why I spoke. I wanted to let you know you were not alone before you did something--something worse.” “Like what?” “Whatever women do when they think they’re alone.” He laughed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about, you surprised me and I’m just--” His smile dropped. “Sorry, I shouldn’t talk…I’m not supposed to talk to you.” “Well, you already have. We may as well meet for real this time, without old Wattlesbrook spying. I’m Jane.” “Theodore the gardener,” he said, wiping off his hand and then offering it to her. She shook it, wondered if they should be bowing and curtsying, but is that what you do with a gardener? The entire conversation felt forbidden, like a secret Austen chapter that she discovered longhand in some forgotten file. “The gardens look lovely.” “Thank you, ma’am.” Ma’am? she thought. “So,” he said, his eyes taking in everything but her face, “you’re from the former colonies?” She looked hard at him to detect if he was serious. He glanced at her, then down again, and sort of bowed. She laughed. He tossed his pick into the ground. “I can’t play this. I sound completely daft.” “Why would you have to play anything?” “I’m supposed to be invisible. You don’t know all the lectures we heard on the matter--stay out of the way, look down, don’t bother the guests. I shouldn’t have said a word, but I was afraid of getting stuck behind that shrub all day trying not to make a peep. Or worse, you discovering me after a time and thinking I was a lecherous lunatic trying to peek up your skirt. So, anyhow, how do you do, the name’s Martin Jasper, originally from Bristol, raised in Sheffield, enjoy seventies rock and walks in the rain, and please don’t tell Mrs. Wattlesbrook. I need this job.” “I didn’t exactly find Mrs. Wattlesbrook the kind of lady I’d be tempted to confide in. Don’t worry, Martin.” “Thanks. Guess I should leave you to your lady stuff.” He picked up his tools and walked away. ~ Shannon Hale

492:BUT AREN’T THESE JUST DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS? HOW CAN A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION BE A STEP TOWARD LIBERALISM? At this point someone may object, “These other meanings for ‘head’ and ‘exercise authority’ are not removing God’s Word from believers; they are just giving a different interpretation. What’s wrong with that? How can that be a step toward liberalism?” In response I would say, there are some kinds of “interpretations” that actually nullify the original statement. For example, let’s say I am driving and I see a sign that says, SPEED LIMIT 45 But suppose I am driving 70 miles per hour, and a policeman stops me. Can I say, “Officer, I just interpreted it differently. I thought the numbers 4 and 5 placed together meant ‘70.’ I guess we just have a difference in interpretation”? Or let’s say I sign a contract that says I agree to “teach six classes” next year, and then I show up the first day and tell the students their assignments, and I never come back again for the whole term. When my academic dean questions me, I say, “Well, I interpreted ‘teach’ differently. I thought ‘teach’ just meant ‘give students assignments for the rest of the term on the first day of class.’ I didn’t interpret it to mean ‘give lectures in classes for a whole term.’ I guess we just have a difference of interpretation.”18 In both cases, these are not legitimate “differences of interpretation” because my meanings are far outside the commonly accepted and recognized ranges of meanings for the words “45” and “teach.” So it is no longer a difference of interpretation. It is a nullification and denial of the statements altogether. That is what I think is happening when evangelical feminists give key verses and key words an entirely different meaning, a meaning far outside the commonly accepted ranges of meanings for those words. That is why the question of hard facts to support those meanings is so important. When the proposals turn out to be contrary to the known evidence, we should conclude that they are untruthful. When the proposals turn out to be unsubstantiated by the known evidence, we should conclude that they are mere speculation, and the previously established meanings of the words should stand. The result of this egalitarian claim is again to chip away at God’s Word for believers, because it removes the sense of the verse that God intended: Previous meaning: I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. New egalitarian meaning: I do not permit a woman to teach or to abuse authority over a man (or: to commit violence against a man, etc.); rather, she is to remain quiet. These new meanings completely change the sense of a key word in 1 Timothy 2:12. But they do so contrary to the evidence about the word’s meaning and its use in a context like this one. And so by removing from God’s people the sense of what his Word actually says, they move another step down the path to liberalism. ~ Wayne Grudem

493:I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book… ~ Cathleen Falsani

494:In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. (13) Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts' natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren't carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. (14) "Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them," she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women's institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. "If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was 'Freedom for Women', so the slogan of our own age must be 'GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!'" And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. (15) The Girls' School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts' University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law. ~ Karel apek

495:TOUZENBACH Si vous voulez. De quoi parlerons-nous ? VERCHININE De quoi ? Rêvons ensemble... par exemple de la vie telle qu’elle sera après nous, dans deux ou trois cents ans. TOUZENBACH Eh bien, après nous on s’envolera en ballon, on changera la coupe des vestons, on découvrira peut-être un sixième sens, qu’on développera, mais la vie restera la même, un vie difficile, pleine de mystère, et heureuse. Et dans mille ans, l’homme soupirera comme aujourd’hui : « Ah ! qu’il est difficile de vivre ! » Et il aura toujours peur de la mort et ne voudra pas mourir. VERCHININE, après avoir réfléchi. Comment vous expliquer ? Il me semble que tout va se transformer peu à peu, que le changement s’accomplit déjà, sous nos yeux. Dans deux ou trois cents ans, dans mille ans peut-être, peu importe le délai, s’établira une vie nouvelle, heureuse. Bien sûr, nous ne serons plus là, mais c’est pour cela que nous vivons, travaillons, souffrons enfin, c’est nous qui la créons, c’est même le seul but de notre existence, et si vous voulez, de notre bonheur. Macha rit doucement. TOUZENBACH Pourquoi riez-vous ? MACHA Je ne sais pas. Je ris depuis ce matin. VERCHININE J’ai fait les mêmes études que vous, je n’ai pas été à l’Académie militaire. Je lis beaucoup, mais je ne sais pas choisir mes lectures, peut-être devrais-je lire tout autre chose ; et cependant, plus je vis, plus j’ai envie de savoir. Mes cheveux blanchissent, bientôt je serai vieux, et je ne sais que peu, oh ! très peu de chose. Pourtant, il me semble que je sais l’essentiel, et que je le sais avec certitude. Comme je voudrais vous prouver qu’il n’y a pas, qu’il ne doit pas y avoir de bonheur pour nous, que nous ne le connaîtrons jamais... Pour nous, il n’y a que le travail, rien que le travail, le bonheur, il sera pour nos lointains descendants. (Un temps.) Le bonheur n’est pas pour moi, mais pour les enfants de mes enfants. TOUZENBACH Alors, d’après vous, il ne faut même pas rêver au bonheur ? Mais si je suis heureux ? VERCHININE Non. TOUZENBACH, joignant les mains et riant. Visiblement, nous ne nous comprenons pas. Comment vous convaincre ? (Macha rit doucement. Il lui montre son index.) Eh bien, riez ! (À Verchinine :) Non seulement dans deux ou trois cents ans, mais dans un million d’années, la vie sera encore la même ; elle ne change pas, elle est immuable, conforme à ses propres lois, qui ne nous concernent pas, ou dont nous ne saurons jamais rien. Les oiseaux migrateurs, les cigognes, par exemple, doivent voler, et quelles que soient les pensées, sublimes ou insignifiantes, qui leur passent par la tête, elles volent sans relâche, sans savoir pourquoi, ni où elles vont. Elles volent et voleront, quels que soient les philosophes qu’il pourrait y avoir parmi elles ; elles peuvent toujours philosopher, si ça les amuse, pourvu qu’elles volent... MACHA Tout de même, quel est le sens de tout cela ? TOUZENBACH Le sens... Voilà, il neige. Où est le sens ? MACHA Il me semble que l’homme doit avoir une foi, du moins en chercher une, sinon sa vie est complètement vide... Vivre et ignorer pourquoi les cigognes volent, pourquoi les enfants naissent, pourquoi il y a des étoiles au ciel... Il faut savoir pourquoi l’on vit, ou alors tout n’est que balivernes et foutaises. Comme dit Gogol : « Il est ennuyeux de vivre en ce monde, messieurs. » ~ Anton Chekhov

496:76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces ~ Mortimer J Adler

497:Didn’t you ever notice that whatever you wanted or whatever you set out to do, Cora wanted to do it too?” Noah asked. “She wasn’t like that.” “She was, Mer. And it’s okay to admit it. One of the hardest things about Cora dying is that everyone wants to erase her—the real Cora. They talk about her as though she were perfect. She wasn’t. ‘Don’t talk ill of the dead,’ people say. But if we aren’t truthful about who our loved ones were, then we aren’t really remembering them. We’re creating someone who didn’t exist. Cora loved you. She loved me. But what she did was not okay. And I’m pissed off about it.” Mercedes reeled back, stunned. “Geez, Noah. Tell me how you really feel. She still deserves our compassion,” she rebuked. He nodded. “Everyone deserves compassion. And I know suicide isn’t always a conscious act. Most of the time it’s sheer desperation. It’s a moment of weakness that we can’t come back from. But regardless of illness or weakness, if we don’t own our actions and don’t demand that others own theirs, then what’s the point? We might as well give up now. We have to expect better of ourselves. We have to. I expect more of my patients, and when I expect more—lovingly, patiently—they tend to rise to that expectation. Maybe not all the way up, but they rise. They improve because I believe they can, and I believe they must. My mom was sick. But she didn’t try hard enough to get better. She found a way to cope—and that’s important—but she never varied from it. Life has to be more than coping. It has to be.” Mercedes nodded slowly, her eyes clinging to his impassioned face. She’d struck a nerve, and he wasn’t finished. “I know it’s not something we’re supposed to say. We’re supposed to be all-loving and all-compassionate all the time. But sometimes the things we aren’t supposed to say are the truths that keep us sane, that tether us to reality, that help us move the hell on! I know some of my colleagues would be shocked to hear it. But pressure—whether it’s the pressure of society, or the pressure of responsibility, or the pressure that comes with being loved and being needed—isn’t always a bad thing. You’ve heard the cliché about pressure and diamonds. It’s a cliché because it’s true. Pressure sometimes begets beautiful things.” Mercedes was silent, studying his handsome face, his tight shoulders, and his clenched fists. He was weary, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t wrong. “Begets?” she asked, a twinkle in her eye. He rolled his eyes. “You know damn well what beget means.” “In the Bible, beget means to give birth to. I wouldn’t mind giving birth to a diamond,” she mused. “You ruin all my best lectures.” There was silence from the kitchen. Silence was not good. “Gia?” Noah called. “What, Daddy?” she answered sweetly. “Are you pooping in your new princess panties?” “No. Poopin’ in box.” “What box?” His voice rose in horror. “Kitty box.” Noah was on his feet, racing toward the kitchen. Mercedes followed. Gia was naked—her Cinderella panties abandoned in the middle of the floor—and perched above the new litter box. “No!” Noah roared in horror, scooping her up and marching to the toilet. “Maybe it won’t be a turd, Noah. Maybe Gia will beget a diamond,” Mercedes chirped, trying not to laugh. “I blame you, Mer!” he called from the bathroom. “She was almost potty-trained, and now she wants to be a cat! ~ Amy Harmon

498:We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow. ~ Hermann Hesse

499:You're trying to kiss Emma?" Rayna says, incredulous. "But you haven't even sifted yet, Galen." "Sifted?" Emma asks. Toraf laughs. "Princess, why don't we go for a swim? You know that storm probably dredged up all sorts of things for your collection." Galen nods a silent thank you to Toraf as he ushers his sister into the living room. For once, he's thankful for Rayna's hoard of human relics. He almost had to drag her to shore by her fin to get past all the old shipwrecks along this coast. "We'll split up, cover more ground," Rayna's saying as they leave. Galen feels Emma looking at him, but he doesn't acknowledge her. Instead, he watches the beach as Toraf and Rayna disappear in the waves, hand in hand. Galen shakes his head. No one should feel sorry for Toraf. He knows just exactly what he's doing. Something Galen wishes he could say of himself. Emma puts a hand on his arm-she won't be ignored. "What is that? Sifted?" Finally he turns, meets her gaze. "It's like dating to humans. Only, it goes a lot faster. And it has more of a purpose than humans sometimes do when they date." "What purpose?" "Sifting is our way of choosing a life mate. When a male turns eighteen, he usually starts sifting to find himself a companion. For a female whose company he will enjoy and ho will be suitable for producing offspring." "Oh," she says, thoughtful. "And...you haven't sifted yet?" He shakes his head, painfully aware of her hand still on his arm. She must realize it at the same time, because she snatches it away. "Why not?" she says, clearing her throat. "Are you not old enough to sift?" "I'm old enough," he says softly. "How old are you, exactly?" "Twenty." He doesn't mean to lean closer to her-or does he? "Is that normal? That you haven't sifted yet?" He shakes his head. "It's pretty much standard for males to be mated by the time they turn nineteen. But my responsibilities as ambassador would take me away from my mate too much. It wouldn't be fair to her." "Oh, right. Keeping a watch on the humans," she says quickly. "You're right. That wouldn't be fair, would it?" He expects another debate. For her to point out, as she did last night, that if there were more ambassadors, he wouldn't have to shoulder the responsibility alone-and she would be right. But she doesn't debate. In fact, she drops the subject altogether. Backing away from him, she seems intent on widening the space he'd closed between them. She fixes her expression into nonchalance. "Well, are you ready to help me turn into a fish?" she says, as if they'd been talking about this the whole time. He blinks. "That's it?" "What?" "No more questions about sifting? No lectures about appointing more ambassadors?" "It's not my business," she says with an indifferent shrug. "Why should I care whether or not you mate? And it's not like I'll be sifting-or sifted. After you teach me to sprout a fin, we'll be going our separate ways. Besides, you wouldn't care if I dated any humans, right?" With that, she leaves him there staring after her, mouth hanging open. At the door, she calls over her shoulder, "I'll meet you on the beach in fifteen minutes. I just have to call my mom and check in and change into my swimsuit." She flips her hair to the side before disappearing up the stairs. He turns to Rachel, who's hand-drying a pan to death, eyebrows reaching for her hairline. He shrugs to her in askance, mouth still ajar. She sighs. "Sweet pea, what did you expect?" "Something other than that. ~ Anna Banks

500:Come inside with me,” he urged, increasing the pressure on her elbow, “and I’ll begin making it up to you.” Elizabeth let herself be drawn forward a few steps and hesitated. “This is a mistake. Everyone will see us and think we’ve started it all over again-“ “No, they won’t,” he promised. “There’s a rumor spreading like fire in there that I tried to get you in my clutches two years ago, but without a title to tempt you I didn’t have a chance. Since acquiring a title is a holy crusade for most of them, they’ll admire your sense. Now that I have a title, I’m expected to use it to try to succeed where I failed before-as a way of bolstering my wounded male pride.” Reaching up to brush a wisp of hair from her soft cheek, he said, “I’m sorry. It was the best I could do with what I had to work with-we were seen together in compromising circumstances. Since they’d never believe nothing happened, I could only make them think I was in pursuit and you were evading.” She flinched from his touch but didn’t shove his hand away. “You don’t understand. What’s happening to me in there is no less than I deserve. I knew what the rules were, and I broke them when I stayed with you at the cottage. You didn’t force me to stay. I broke the rules, and-“ “Elizabeth,” he interrupted in a voice edge with harsh remorse, “if you won’t do anything else for me, at least stop exonerating me for that weekend. I can’t bear it. I exerted more force on you than you understand.” Longing to kiss her, Ian had to be satisfied instead with trying to convince her his plan would work, because he now needed her help to ensure its success. In a teasing voice he said, “I think you’re underrating my gift for strategy and subtlety. Come and dance with me, and I’ll prove to you how easily most of the male minds in there have been manipulated.” Despite his confidence, moments after they entered the ballroom Ian noticed the increasing coldness of the looks being directed at them, and he knew a moment of real alarm-until he glanced at Elizabeth as he took her in his arms for a waltz and realized the cause of it. “Elizabeth,” he said in a low, urgent voice, gazing down at her bent head, “stop looking meek! Put your nose in the air and cut me dead or flirt with me, but do not on any account look humble, because these people will interpret it as guilt!” Elizabeth, who had been staring at his shoulder, as she'd done with her other dancing partners, tipped her head back and looked at him in confusion. "What?" Ian's heart turned over when the chandeliers overhead revealed the wounded look in her glorious green eyes. Realizing logic and lectures weren't going to help her give the performance he badly needed her to give, he tried the tack that had, in Scotland, made her stop crying and begin to laugh: He tried to tease her. Casting about for a subject, he said quickly, "Belhaven is certainly in fine looks tonight-pink satin pantaloons. I asked him for the name of his tailor so that I could order a pair for myself." Elizabeth looked at him as if he'd taken leave of his senses; then his warning about looking meek hit home, and she began to understand what he wanted her to do. That added to the comic image of Ian's tall, masculine frame in those absurd pink pantaloons enabled her to manage a weak smile. "I have greatly admired those pantaloons myself," she said. "Will you also order a yellow satin coat to complement the look?" He smiled. "I thought-puce." "An unusual combination," she averred softly, "but one that I am sure will make you the envy of all who behold you. ~ Judith McNaught