100:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#KEYS |
101:The Two Paths Of Yoga :::
14 April 1929 - What are the dangers of Yoga? Is it especially dangerous to the people of the West? Someone has said that Yoga may be suitable for the East, but it has the effect of unbalancing the Western mind.
Yoga is not more dangerous to the people of the West than to those of the East. Everything depends upon the spirit with which you approach it. Yoga does become dangerous if you want it for your own sake, to serve a personal end. It is not dangerous, on the contrary, it is safety and security itself, if you go to it with a sense of its sacredness, always remembering that the aim is to find the Divine.
Dangers and difficulties come in when people take up Yoga not for the sake of the Divine, but because they want to acquire power and under the guise of Yoga seek to satisfy some ambition. if you cannot get rid of ambition, do not touch the thing. It is fire that burns.
There are two paths of Yoga, one of tapasya (discipline), and the other of surrender. The path of tapasya is arduous. Here you rely solely upon yourself, you proceed by your own strength. You ascend and achieve according to the measure of your force. There is always the danger of falling down. And once you fall, you lie broken in the abyss and there is hardly a remedy. The other path, the path of surrender, is safe and sure. It is here, however, that the Western people find their difficulty. They have been taught to fear and avoid all that threatens their personal independence. They have imbibed with their mothers' milk the sense of individuality. And surrender means giving up all that. In other words, you may follow, as Ramakrishna says, either the path of the baby monkey or that of the baby cat. The baby monkey holds to its mother in order to be carried about and it must hold firm, otherwise if it loses its grip, it falls. On the other hand, the baby cat does not hold to its mother, but is held by the mother and has no fear nor responsibility; it has nothing to do but to let the mother hold it and cry ma ma.
If you take up this path of surrender fully and sincerely, there is no more danger or serious difficulty. The question is to be sincere. If you are not sincere, do not begin Yoga. If you were dealing in human affairs, then you could resort to deception; but in dealing with the Divine there is no possibility of deception anywhere. You can go on the Path safely when you are candid and open to the core and when your only end is to realise and attain the Divine and to be moved by the Divine. There is another danger; it is in connection with the sex impulses. Yoga in its process of purification will lay bare and throw up all hidden impulses and desires in you. And you must learn not to hide things nor leave them aside, you have to face them and conquer and remould them. The first effect of Yoga, however, is to take away the mental control, and the hungers that lie dormant are suddenly set free, they rush up and invade the being. So long as this mental control has not been replaced by the Divine control, there is a period of transition when your sincerity and surrender will be put to the test. The strength of such impulses as those of sex lies usually in the fact that people take too much notice of them; they protest too vehemently and endeavour to control them by coercion, hold them within and sit upon them. But the more you think of a thing and say, "I don't want it, I don't want it", the more you are bound to it. What you should do is to keep the thing away from you, to dissociate from it, take as little notice of it as possible and, even if you happen to think of it, remain indifferent and unconcerned. The impulses and desires that come up by the pressure of Yoga should be faced in a spirit of detachment and serenity, as something foreign to yourself or belonging to the outside world. They should be offered to the Divine, so that the Divine may take them up and transmute them. If you have once opened yourself to the Divine, if the power of the Divine has once come down into you and yet you try to keep to the old forces, you prepare troubles and difficulties and dangers for yourself. You must be vigilant and see that you do not use the Divine as a cloak for the satisfaction of your desires. There are many self-appointed Masters, who do nothing but that. And then when you are off the straight path and when you have a little knowledge and not much power, it happens that you are seized by beings or entities of a certain type, you become blind instruments in their hands and are devoured by them in the end. Wherever there is pretence, there is danger; you cannot deceive God. Do you come to God saying, "I want union with you" and in your heart meaning "I want powers and enjoyments"? Beware! You are heading straight towards the brink of the precipice. And yet it is so easy to avoid all catastrophe. Become like a child, give yourself up to the Mother, let her carry you, and there is no more danger for you.
This does not mean that you have not to face other kinds of difficulties or that you have not to fight and conquer any obstacles at all. Surrender does not ensure a smooth and unruffled and continuous progression. The reason is that your being is not yet one, nor your surrender absolute and complete. Only a part of you surrenders; and today it is one part and the next day it is another. The whole purpose of the Yoga is to gather all the divergent parts together and forge them into an undivided unity. Till then you cannot hope to be without difficulties - difficulties, for example, like doubt or depression or hesitation. The whole world is full of the poison. You take it in with every breath. If you exchange a few words with an undesirable man or even if such a man merely passes by you, you may catch the contagion from him. It is sufficient for you to come near a place where there is plague in order to be infected with its poison; you need not know at all that it is there. You can lose in a few minutes what it has taken you months to gain. So long as you belong to humanity and so long as you lead the ordinary life, it does not matter much if you mix with the people of the world; but if you want the divine life, you will have to be exceedingly careful about your company and your environment.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #KEYS |
102:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education, #KEYS |
103:It does not matter if you do not understand it - Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you will see that something is added, something which was hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.
But you must not read it as you read other books or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open; then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly to this white page, will put their stamp upon the brain, will explain themselves without your making any effort.
Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.
*He has crammed the whole universe in a single book.* It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of an incomparable perfection.
You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me, *I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still, I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help.* And you know what it was? It was - before beginning, I warn you in advance - it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... *asserted Himself*. And the day He actually began it, He told me: *I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.
In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended "en masse" from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines - in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course French literature, also in German and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seems to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality - apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like in it the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.
It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there. You can find all the answers to all your questions there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophesies, all that is going to come is presented with the precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience - reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possessed, He has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.
All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences and that He had noted them down afterwards, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.
These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened before, He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is His whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth-consciousness.
And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, - it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.
And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with a new consciousness which will be able to understand. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is a *super-epic,* it is super-literature, super-poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines He has written. No, these human words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperboles to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is, at least I do not find them. It is of immense value - spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come into contact with it, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing He has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be seen.
My child, every day you are going to read Savitri; read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness; as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever, wanting to practice Yoga, tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide, for all that he needs he will find Savitri. If he remains very quiet when before a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if lead by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.
Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble. - 5 November 1967
~ The Mother, Sweet Mother, The Mother to Mona Sarkar, [T0],#KEYS |
104: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 passage
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura et nos in aeternum
Exilium 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 vain
Upon 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 tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno,#KEYS |
| 1:Life is a dream, realise it. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove |
| 2:Those who realise their folly are not true fools. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove |
| 3:I realise that stress is only fear. I now release all fears ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove |
| 4:I have come to realise that men are not born to be free. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove |
| 5:People do not realise the immense value of utilising spare minutes. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove |
| 6:It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove |
| 7:To realise the supreme, we need the experience of the opposites. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 8:There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove |
| 9:Until we realise ourselves as the Absolute, we cannot attain to deliverance. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 10:Man always is perfect, or he never could become so; but he had to realise it. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 11:Realise that no ideas are your own, they all come to you from outside. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 12:I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove |
| 13:The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove |
| 14:Realise the power of a single choice acted upon immediately and with total conviction. ~ tony-robbins, @wisdomtrove |
| 15:John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove |
| 16:To realise the immovable means to become immovable. And the purpose is the good of all that lives. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 17:Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove |
| 18:One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove |
| 19:What a liberation to realiSe that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove |
| 20:Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove |
| 21:When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice—the thinker—but the one who is aware of it. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove |
| 22:Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them. ~ paulo-coelho, @wisdomtrove |
| 23:You must realise yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 24:Just realise that nothing observable, or experienceable is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 25:Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realise your true nature. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 26:It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove |
| 27:You must begin by being the dispassionate observer. Then only will you realise your full being as the universal lover and actor. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 28:Turn away from the experience to the experiencer and realise the full import of the only true statement you can make: & |
| 29:All too soon will Childhood gay Realise Life's sober sadness. Let's be merry while we may, Innocent and happy Fay! Elves were made for gladness! ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove |
| 30:This is a dream of awakening. It is designed to make you progressively more conscious, until you’re conscious enough to realise that you’re dreaming. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 31:You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that is holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove |
| 32:You can't realise love or yourself until you are still enough to drop down through the restlessness and frustrations into that deeper level of your being ~ barry-long, @wisdomtrove |
| 33:Realise that to make a principle part of your life, you must pay the price by actually living it, rather than merely understanding it intellectually. ~ stephen-r-covey, @wisdomtrove |
| 34:If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove |
| 35:When you realise that you are the light of the world, you will also realise that you are the love of it; that to know is to love and to love is to know. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 36:At such moments, you realise that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove |
| 37:Life is a process. And by its nature, it is a struggle. But it is a beautiful and worthwhile struggle. And when you realise that, it’s no longer so much of a struggle. ~ aimee-davies, @wisdomtrove |
| 38:When we realise we are essentially one with everyone and everything, we find ourselves intimately connected to everyone and everything. We experience love without limits. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 39:Everybody has God inside, but not everybody is able to see God within. One can see God only when one cries for Him. Those who cry for God and pray to God can realise God. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove |
| 40:More are the names of God and infinite are the forms through which He may be approached. In whatever name and form you worship Him, through them you will realise Him. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove |
| 41:If you are already an awakened soul, Then you must realise That God has already given you A supreme task to perform: He wants you to work For His Vision's world-blossoms. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove |
| 42:But when we realise we are essentially one with everyone and everything, we find ourselves intimately connected to everyone and everything. We experience love without limits. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 43:The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove |
| 44:I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove |
| 45:While you are dreaming you believe you are the person you appear to be in the dream. But when you dream lucidly you realise you are much more than you seem to be, because you are the dreamer. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 46:Your trials did not come to punish you, but to awaken you - to make you realise that you are a part of Spirit and that just behind the sparks of your life is the Flame of Infinity. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 47:I want to suggest that life is like a dream and that right now we are so engrossed in the life-dream that we don’t realise we are dreaming. We believe we know what is going on, but really we don’t. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 48:Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove |
| 49:Of the entire universe, you are the subtle cause. All is because you are. Grasp this point firmly and deeply and dwell on it repeatedly. To realise this as absolutely true, is liberation. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 50:The clearer you understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your search and realise your limitless being. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 51:You swore you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but now you realise He's not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And say, do you want to make a deal How does it feel ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove |
| 52:Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realise your ideal of compassion. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove |
| 53:How does it feel to realise that we are not separate? How does it feel to be one with everyone and everything? For me it is an experience of communion and compassion. Being one with all, I am in love with all. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 54:Do realise that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being - this is the absolute truth. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 55:You are the Self, here and now. Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realise that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 56:The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove |
| 57:First, we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realise that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 58:Let's realise that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let's realise that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself o herself, and condemn us in return. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove |
| 59:Man has infinite power within himself, and he can realise it - he can realise himself as the one infinite Self. It can be done; but you do not believe it. You pray to God and keep your powder dry all the time. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 60:Work done for the Self gives no bondage. Neither desire pleasure nor fear pain from work. It is the mind and body that work, not I. Tell yourself this unceasingly and realise it. Try not to know that you work. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 61:You feel unsafe, because you imagine danger. Of course, your body as such is complex and vulnerable and needs protection. But not you. Once you realise your own unassailable being, you will be at peace. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 62:Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realise yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 63:Once you realise, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course, your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 64:Shift attention to the Self and keep it there. All happens as if there is a mysterious power that creates and moves everything. realise that you are not the mover, only the observer, and you will be at peace. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 65:A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove |
| 66:Are you with me? How does it feel to realise that we are not separate? How does it feel to be one with everyone and everything? For me it is an experience of communion and compassion. Being one with all, I am in love with all. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 67:But when we realise we are essentially one with everyone and everything, we find ourselves intimately connected to everyone and everything. We experience love without limits. The one life-dreamer meeting itself in different forms. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove |
| 68:Once you realise that there is nothing in this world, which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 69:We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove |
| 70:You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove |
| 71:I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‘Oh my God, what a blessing.’ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe. ~ paulo-coelho, @wisdomtrove |
| 72:Y ou speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove |
| 73:You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.” ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove |
| 74:It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove |
| 75:Realise once for all that neither your body nor your mind, nor even your consciousness is yourself and stand alone in your true nature beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. No effort can take you there, only the clarity of understanding. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 76:One must know that the real exists and is of the nature of witness-consciousness. Of course, it is beyond the witness, but to enter it one must first realise the state of pure witnessing. The awareness of conditions brings one to the unconditioned. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 77: M: It is only because you identify yourself with them. Once you realise that whatever appears before you cannot be yourself, and cannot say & |
| 78:Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being & |
| 79:Realise this: one day your soul will depart from your body and you will be drawn behind the curtain that floats between us and the unknown. While you wait for that moment, be happy, because you don't know where you came from and you don't know where you will be going. ~ omar-khayyam, @wisdomtrove |
| 80:Enlightenment cannot be attained if it is sought as a future goal. Give up the search. The entry point is now, not in the future. The ego can only be transcended in the now. In the depth of you, your essence is already complete. You are already it. You just need to realise it. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove |
| 81:We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove |
| 82:Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove |
| 83:There is a need for aloneness, which I don't think most people realise for an actor. It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like sort of a chunk of you. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove |
| 84:If you trust me, believe when I tell you that you are the pure awareness that illuminates consciousness and its infinite content. Realise this and live accordingly. If you do not believe me, then go within, enquiring ‘What am I’? or, focus your mind on ‘I am’, which is pure and simple being. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 85:The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source. When you realise that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being. It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 86:Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realise that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 87:I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove |
| 88:Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove |
| 89:There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove |
| 90:This is the end of Yoga - to realise independence. All that happens, happens in and to the mind, not to the source of the ‘I am’. Once you realise that all happens by itself, (call it destiny, or the will of God or mere accident), you remain as witness only, understanding and enjoying, but not perturbed. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 91:Q: How does one reach the Supreme State? M: By renouncing all lesser desires. As long as you are pleased with the lesser, you cannot have the highest. Whatever pleases you, keeps you back. Until you realise the unsatisfactoriness of everything, its transiency and limitation, and collect your energies in one great longing, even the first step is not made. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 92:Something magical happens when you begin to love and accept yourself. You start to shine your light again. You realise that you are connected to a deeper Self, a divine spark within. This divine spark is the light of your inner awareness, illuminating all your life experiences, and when you sink back and rest in it, as it, it is felt as a sense of pure aliveness and joy. ~ aimee-davies, @wisdomtrove |
| 93:Gradually, physicists began to realise that nature, at the atomic level, does not appear as a mechanical universe composed of fundamental building blocks, but rather as a network of relations, and that, ultimately, there are no parts at all in this interconnected web. Whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures our attention. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove |
| 94:Before prayer, endeavour to realise Whose Presence you are approaching and to Whom you are about to speak, keeping in mind Whom you are addressing. If our lives were a thousand times as long as they are we should never fully understand how we ought to behave towards God, before Whom the very Angels tremble, Who can do all He wills, and with Whom to wish is to accomplish. ~ teresa-of-avila, @wisdomtrove |
| 95:Q: Being a person, limited in space and time, how can I possibly realise myself as the opposite; a de-personalised, universalised awareness of nothing in particular? M. Behave as if you were pure awareness, bodiless and mindless, spaceless and timeless, beyond & |
| 96:The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background of awareness, which does not change. The mind must come to know the true self and respect it and cease covering it up, like the moon which obscures the sun during solar eclipse. Just realise that nothing observable, or experienceable is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 97:In the mirror of your mind images appear and disappear. The mirror remains. Learn to distinguish the immovable in the movable, the unchanging in the changing, till you realise that all differences are in appearance only and oneness is a fact. This basic identity - you may call God, or Brahman, the words matters little - is only the realisation that all is one. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 98:While the mind is centred in the body and consciousness is centred in the mind, awareness is free. The body has its urges and mind its pains and pleasures. Awareness is unattached and unshaken. It is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert and unafraid, without desire and fear. Meditate on it as your true being and try to be it in your daily life, and you shall realise it in its fullness. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 99:The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realise that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 100:Thus to act under the guidance coming from above, this is one side of the sadhana, the dynamic side. The other one is the discrimination between the Purusha and the Prakriti. The Purusha will calmly observe, give sanction, choose, but will realise that all this does not belong to him - all these are outside him. This is the static side of the sadhana. These two aspects constitute the basis of Yoga. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove |
| 101:First realise that your world is only a reflection of yourself and stop finding fault with the reflection. Attend to yourself, set yourself right - mentally and emotionally. The physical will follow automatically. You talk so much of reforms: economic, social, political. Leave alone the reforms and mind the reformer. What kind of world can a man create who is stupid, greedy, heartless? ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 102:For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove |
| 103:You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realise that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 104:Let us realise [that] we are the infinite power. Who put a limit to the power of mind? Let us realise we are all mind. Every drop has the whole of the ocean in it. That is the mind of man. The Indian mind reflects upon these [powers and potentialities] and wants to bring [them] all out. For himself he doesn't care what happens. It will take a great length of time [to reach perfection]. If it takes fifty thousand years, what of that! ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 105:Think of all the years passed by in which you said to yourself I’ll do it tomorrow, and how the gods have again and again granted you periods of grace of which you have not availed yourself. It is time to realise that you are a member of the Universe, that you are born of Nature itself, and to know that a limit has been set to your time. Use every moment wisely, to perceive your inner refulgence, or ’twill be gone and nevermore within your reach. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove |
| 106:[Not parroting.] My old Master used to say, "It is all very good to teach the parrot to say, & |
| 107:Having seen that you are a bundle of memories held together by attachment, step out and look from the outside. You may perceive for the first time something which is not memory. You cease to be a Mr-so-and-so, busy about his own affairs. You are at last at peace. You realise that nothing was ever wrong with the world - you alone were wrong and now it is all over. Never again will you be caught in the meshes of desire born of ignorance. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 108:However little of anything you have, you can always find someone who has less. Find that someone and give to them from the abundance that is yours. Seek not to be the recipient of anything but to be the source. That which you wish to have, cause another to have. That which you hope to experience, cause anther to experience. For what you give you become. And in so doing, you will realise that you have had these things in your possession all along. ~ neale-donald-walsch, @wisdomtrove |
| 109:Q: Are there levels of awareness? M: There are levels in consciousness, but not in awareness. It is of one block, homogeneous. Its reflection in the mind is love and understanding. There are levels of clarity in understanding and intensity in love, but not in their source. The source is simple and single, but its gifts are infinite. Only do not take the gifts for the source. realise yourself as the source and not as the river; that is all. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 110:It is natural and good to love oneself. Only you should know what exactly do you love. It is not the body that you love, it is Life -perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. realise it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. Therefore, find yourself, for in finding that you find all. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 111:The beginning of freedom is the realisation that you are not the "thinker." The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realise that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also begin to realise that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove |
| 112:There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove |
| 113:Realisation of love can never come so long as there is the least desire in the heart, or what Shri Ramakrishna used to say, attachment for K√¢ma-K√¢nchana (sense-pleasure and wealth). In the perfect realisation of love, even the consciousness of one's own body does not exist. Also, the supreme Jnana is to realise the oneness everywhere, to see one's own self as the Self in everything. That too cannot come so long as there is the least consciousness of the ego (Aham). ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 114:Individuality in universality is the plan of creation. Each cell has its part in bringing about consciousness. Man is individual and at the same time universal. It is while realising our individual nature that we realise even our national and universal nature. Each is an infinite circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. By practice one can feel universal Selfhood which is the essence of Hinduism. He who sees in every being his own Self is a Pandita (sage). ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove |
| 115:It is like the flower and its colour. Without flower - no colours; without colour - the flower remains unseen. Beyond is the light which on contact with the flower creates the colour. realise that your true nature is that of pure light only, and both the perceived and the perceiver come and go together. That which makes both possible, and yet is neither, is your real being, which means not being a & |
| 116:Realise that your entire life journey ultimately consists of the step you are taking at this moment. There is always only this one step, and so you give it your fullest attention. This doesn't mean you don't know where you are going; it just means this step is primary, the destination secondary. And what you encounter at your destination once you get there depends on the quality of this one step. Another way of putting it: What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove |
| 117: M: That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is but a dimensionless point of consciousness, a conscious nothing; all you can say about yourself is: & |
| 118:My doctrine means that I must identify myself with life, with everything that lives, that I must share the majesty of life in the presence of God. The sum-total of this life is God. .. Man is not at peace with himself until he has become like unto God. The endeavor to reach this state is the supreme, the only ambition worth having. And this is self-realisation. This self-realisation is the subject of the Gita, as it is of all scriptures... to be a real devotee is to realise oneself. Self-realisation is not something apart. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove |
| 119:Realise that all happens in consciousness and you are the root, the source, the foundation of consciousness. The world is but a succession of experiences and you are what makes them conscious, and yet remain beyond all experience. It is like the heat, the flame and the burning wood. The heat maintains the flame, the flame consumes the wood. Without heat, there would be neither flame nor fuel. Similarly, without awareness there would be no consciousness, nor life, which transforms matter into a vehicle of consciousness. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 120:For the mystics, religion is not just a matter of creeds and rituals, it is a spiritual path to the experiential knowledge of God. It is the process of eradicating all the selfishness that binds us to our illusionary separate identities and blinds us to the omnipresent Oneness. To walk this way we must abandon our own personal desires and completely accept all that God wills. More than this, we must realise that self-will is ultimately an illusion, for as the 14th-century mystic Mother Julian of Norwich says & |
| 121:The liberal story instructs me to seek freedom to express and realise myself. But both the ‘self’ and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy tales of ancient times. Liberalism has a particularly confused notion of ‘free will’. Humans obviously have a will, they have desires, and they are sometimes free to fulfil their desires. If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire – then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire – then no, humans have no free will. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove |
| 122: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 ¬ó that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, & |
| 123:The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false, you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst. With the body comes the world, with the world - God, who is supposed to have created the world and thus it starts - fears, religions, prayers, sacrifices, all sorts of systems - all to protect and support the child-man, frightened out of his wits by monsters of his own making. realise that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone all suffering ends. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 124:You cannot see yourself as independent of everything unless you drop everything and remain unsupported and undefined. Once you know yourself, it is immaterial what you do, but to realise your independence, you must test it by letting go all you were dependent on. The realised man lives on the level of the absolutes; his wisdom, love and courage are complete, there is nothing relative about him. Therefore, he must prove himself by tests more stringent, undergo trials more demanding. The tester, the tested and the set up for testing are all within; it is an inner drama to which none can be a party. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 125:Once you realise that there is nothing in this world, which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved. As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase. But when you know yourself as beyond space and time - in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable - you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are - against fear there is no other remedy. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove |
| 126:There is the body and there is the Self. Between them is the mind, in which the Self is reflected as & |
| 127:According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful! ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove |
*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M *** |
| 1:Life is a dream, realise it. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB |
| 2:Realise this: one day your soul ~ Omar Khayyam, #NFDB |
| 3:We're God too but we don't realise it. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB |
| 4:We never realise how transparent we are. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 5:To realise our dreams we must decide to wake up. ~ Josephine Baker, #NFDB |
| 6:The trick is to realise how much the sack can hold. ~ Preeti Shenoy, #NFDB |
| 7:Let this be our one need in life, to realise the Divine. ~ The Mother, #NFDB |
| 8:People are much more interesting than people realise. ~ Peter Ackroyd, #NFDB |
| 9:I didn't realise you'd ridden here on your high horse ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB |
| 10:In 'Insurgent' we realise how large the world really is ~ Veronica Roth, #NFDB |
| 11:Education is helping the child realise his potentialities. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB |
| 12:I realise that stress is only fear. I now release all fears ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB |
| 13:I begin to realise how far others will go to keep us down. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB |
| 14:When I think about sex it makes me realise how alone I feel. ~ Tracey Emin, #NFDB |
| 15:You realise good girls don't really go to heave, right? ~ Stephanie Tromly, #NFDB |
| 16:To realise one's destiny is a person's only real obligation. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 17:When you see everything you realise nothing means anything. ~ Dennis Cooper, #NFDB |
| 18:I have come to realise that men are not born to be free. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB |
| 19:Innocence isn't something we lose, but realise we don't need. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB |
| 20:I think people realise that I'm happy with what I've achieved. ~ Kelly Holmes, #NFDB |
| 21:Let the world know your dreams, my friend; realise them! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 22:It is the supermind we have to bring down, manifest, realise. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB |
| 23:The greatest minds never realise their ideals in any matter; ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB |
| 24:All that is required to realise the Self is to “Be Still. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 25:You never realise how fragile everything is until it breaks. ~ Anthony Horowitz, #NFDB |
| 26:All that is required to realise the Self is to “Be Still.” ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 27:I think sometimes I don't realise how much the pressure gets to me. ~ Liam Payne, #NFDB |
| 28:Evil works, we realise, by sapping the will with over-complication. ~ Tom Shippey, #NFDB |
| 29:One day you’ll wake up and you’ll realise that you’re OK again. ~ Carole Matthews, #NFDB |
| 30:Only if we realise how sh*t we were at Blackburn can we improve. ~ Paolo Di Canio, #NFDB |
| 31:We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB |
| 32:you're so busy being you, you don't realise how unprecedented you are ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 33:Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB |
| 34:To realise that one has nobody in the world—that is a sobering thought. ~ Rhys Bowen, #NFDB |
| 35:Do you realise that Eve was the only woman who ever took a man's side? ~ Milton Berle, #NFDB |
| 36:Having been a father for 19 years I realise fatherhood has changed me. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB |
| 37:I do realise that when I laugh, it sounds like a seal is being molested. ~ Jimmy Carr, #NFDB |
| 38:The final goal of all religions is to realise the essential oneness. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 39:The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made. ~ Louis Kahn, #NFDB |
| 40:I didn't realise that Ridley Scott has never won an Academy Award. ~ Denzel Washington, #NFDB |
| 41:Jihad is nothing but making efforts to realise goodness in life. ~ Asghar Ali Engineer, #NFDB |
| 42:I didn't realise those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped. ~ Jean Louis Gassee, #NFDB |
| 43:You have to realise that touching is a real violation of personal space. ~ Jane Goodall, #NFDB |
| 44:A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we’re on? ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 45:Hold on to your dreams, Kiall. They are more important than you realise. ~ David Gemmell, #NFDB |
| 46:we realise that Peace is true and not conflict, Love is true and not hatred; ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 47:Do human beings ever realise life, while they live it every, every minute. ~ Jillian Dodd, #NFDB |
| 48:Don't let life pass you by before you realise that it was worth living. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB |
| 49:People do not realise the immense value of utilising spare minutes. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB |
| 50:The thing I realise is that it's not what you take, it's what you leave. ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB |
| 51:Do not pretend - be.Do not promise - act.Do not dream - realise. ~ The Mother#Sriaurobindo, #NFDB |
| 52:It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB |
| 53:Nobody can afford to sleep anymore. Do you realise how much it costs? ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 54:People realise that his promise [Tony Blair's] to 'save the NHS' was just talk. ~ Liam Fox, #NFDB |
| 55:The game has gone rather scrappy as both sides realise they could win this ~ Kevin Keegan, #NFDB |
| 56:I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries. ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB |
| 57:...occasionally I can be quite evil, when there's no-one around to realise. ~ Sarra Manning, #NFDB |
| 58:They don’t realise what they do at that age can still haunt them years later. ~ Jane Harper, #NFDB |
| 59:Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB |
| 60:I think women realise that I love women, and very often women seem to love me. ~ Chuck Close, #NFDB |
| 61:There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB |
| 62:When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is. ~ Helen Dunmore, #NFDB |
| 63:You are very attractive. And your greatest charm is that you do not realise it! ~ A J Cronin, #NFDB |
| 64:So often people say something and you realise you haven't really heard it. ~ Joely Richardson, #NFDB |
| 65:The more you travel the more you realise that you must travel even more! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 66:All of a sudden you realise that you are the person who has control of your life. ~ Jim Henson, #NFDB |
| 67:Friends always say you don't realise how robust your baby is until you drop it. ~ Emily Watson, #NFDB |
| 68:I think it's important to realise you can miss something, but not want it back. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 69:Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB |
| 70:The closer you are to people, the more you realise what has happened to them. ~ Jennifer Lynch, #NFDB |
| 71:They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed. ~ Ry Murakami, #NFDB |
| 72:You will best realise the speed of life when you stop and watch the life! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 73:Grace said, “Connie didn’t realise she was dead until I pointed it out.” Pearl ~ Gillian Larkin, #NFDB |
| 74:Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying. ~ David Benioff, #NFDB |
| 75:After a long time with someone, you realise you've been thinking for two. ~ Kristin Scott Thomas, #NFDB |
| 76:I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother. ~ St Lucia, #NFDB |
| 77:Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 78:Until we realise ourselves as the Absolute, we cannot attain to deliverance. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 79:What good is winning a battle, if you don't even realise there's a war going on? ~ Aravind Adiga, #NFDB |
| 80:Adults make mistakes too. And sometimes it can take a while before they realise it. ~ Cathy Glass, #NFDB |
| 81:made her realise, again, how lucky she’d been to grow up in a secure, loving home. ~ Sarah Hilary, #NFDB |
| 82:Man always is perfect, or he never could become so; but he had to realise it. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 83:You gave up the universe for a life on the sofa?’ ‘I didn’t realise that at the time. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 84:Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB |
| 85:One must realise his Self in order to open the store of unalloyed happiness. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 86:People do not realise that the best way to make a person bow his head is to praise him. ~ Samarpan, #NFDB |
| 87:To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there. ~ Nadeem Aslam, #NFDB |
| 88:We must realise that prophetic cry of black students: Black man you are on your own! ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB |
| 89:When someone takes away your pens you realise quite how important education is. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB |
| 90:When you work with a great director, you realise you are far from being a director. ~ Barkhad Abdi, #NFDB |
| 91:Why did you push her ?' Rosa screams again. I realise she's pointing at me. ~ Justine Larbalestier, #NFDB |
| 92:I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB |
| 93:Live for yourself. Love those around you - but realise they have their own agendas. ~ Alex Gaskarth, #NFDB |
| 94:The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB |
| 95:We don't realise how much the world has affected us. We put God in the background. ~ Henry Blackaby, #NFDB |
| 96:You need to realise that you must have something to aim for, something to drive you. ~ Rohit Sharma, #NFDB |
| 97:A lot of people don't realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB |
| 98:How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB |
| 99:I'm always having ideas. I'd like to continue being able to realise the ideas I have. ~ Jamie Hewlett, #NFDB |
| 100:In an art museum, you shall realise how banal and how ordinary the life outside! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 101:To realise the soothing power of simple life is to find the secret of happiness! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 102:As I've gotten older and learned more, I realise that Hollywood has not told the truth. ~ Phil Collins, #NFDB |
| 103:I tell the truth; listen everyone. Only those who have Loved, will realise the Lord ~ Guru Gobind Singh, #NFDB |
| 104:I watch Iniesta and realise that, even at my age, I could be learning new things. ~ Juan Roman Riquelme, #NFDB |
| 105:In an art museum, you shall realise how banal and how ordinary the life outside is! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 106:One must realise his [her] Self in order to open the store of unalloyed happiness. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 107:Success, I've come to realise, is fleeting so you shouldn't value it too much. ~ Marina and the Diamonds, #NFDB |
| 108:The best leaders are humble enough to realise their victories depend upon their people. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB |
| 109:Why do we only realise who we are at the end of a long journey in the wrong direction? ~ Iain Rob Wright, #NFDB |
| 110:And I come to realise that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows. ~ Luke Davies, #NFDB |
| 111:Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB |
| 112:One must be very particular about telling the truth. Through truth one can realise God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB |
| 113:Success is different for every artist - I get psyched when i help realise their vision etc. ~ Matt Squire, #NFDB |
| 114:But it's terrifying to realise how much of your world is wrapped up in loving another person ~ Jessi Kirby, #NFDB |
| 115:Do you realise how much trouble you're in?" "Perhaps I'll have some Weetabix after all. ~ Anthony Horowitz, #NFDB |
| 116:As you get older you realise your parents aren't these superheroes. They're actually people. ~ Rumer Willis, #NFDB |
| 117:My dad's a very sensitive man, but as the archetypal rebellious teenager, I didn't realise that. ~ Jo Brand, #NFDB |
| 118:This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand. ~ Sara Baume, #NFDB |
| 119:You know there is a thin line between love and hate. Maybe you loved me and didn't realise ~ Kirsty Moseley, #NFDB |
| 120:All that is required to realise the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 121:I started to realise that being impolite saves an awful lot of time and costs you nothing. ~ Jeremy Clarkson, #NFDB |
| 122:When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
123:Do you realise how much trouble you're in?"
"Perhaps I'll have some Weetabix after all. ~ Anthony Horowitz,#NFDB |
| 124:...smart enough to get out of one trap, but too foolish to realise he wont't escape a second. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB |
| 125:When humility is exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were, exist at all. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
| 126:When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
| 127:It became a game, a challenge, to realise the exact moment that the predictions came true. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB |
128:Realise your Individual self-worth and believe that you are a unique and significant person of the world
~,#NFDB |
| 129:Sometimes it takes watching someone else observe how you live to realise exactly how you live. ~ Jasmine Warga, #NFDB |
| 130:The moment when you realise that you are stupid, you catch your best chance to be clever! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 131:The only way to be a giant in this universe is to realise first that you are a dwarf yet! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 132:Unity the race moves towards and must one day realise. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Diversity in Oneness, #NFDB |
| 133:What distinguishes man from the brute is his conscious striving to realise the spirit within. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 134:If you see a very long road, think about the universe and realise how so very short it is! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 135:Sometimes we do not realise how much we have been suffering until that suffering is removed. ~ Imogen Robertson, #NFDB |
| 136:I always had long hair. When you lose it, you realise just how important it is to your identity. ~ Delta Goodrem, #NFDB |
| 137:I came to realise that my life, which had seemed so unmistakably real, consisted only of memories ~ John Harwood, #NFDB |
| 138:I feel Scottish when with English people, and when I'm with Scottish people, I realise I'm English. ~ Nina Conti, #NFDB |
| 139:If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 140:I hope people realise that there is a brain underneath the hair and a heart underneath the boobs. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB |
| 141:It's always easy coming back to the places where people know your name, until you realise it isn't, ~ Andi Teran, #NFDB |
142:What is God?
God is the perfection that we must aspire to realise.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB |
| 143:You never realise how fragile everything is until it breaks. And that day it was all smashed. ~ Anthony Horowitz, #NFDB |
| 144:It took me time to adjust and to realise it was not going to happen like it did in the juniors. ~ Amelie Mauresmo, #NFDB |
| 145:Live television is always stressful and the more you do it, the more you realise what can go wrong. ~ Alan Hansen, #NFDB |
| 146:She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 147:The police are people as well. All those nasty people aren't really nasty if they'd realise it. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB |
| 148:When you're doing some things that are damaging you, you don't really realise it at the time. ~ Natasha Henstridge, #NFDB |
| 149:You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realise this and you will find strength.’ Fourth ~ Preeti Shenoy, #NFDB |
| 150:You realise Group Captain that this might be the most important weather forecast in history? ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB |
| 151:You realise that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you,” he said. ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 152:Don’t underestimate me. I know more than I say, think more than I speak and notice more than you realise. ~ Unknown, #NFDB |
| 153:I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB |
| 154:it had taken Jack a moment to realise it wasn't weight he'd lost during these eight months but pride ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB |
| 155:It's a pretty big shock to realise that the only people you can identify with are psychopathic killers. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB |
| 156:It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely. ~ Kameron Hurley, #NFDB |
| 157:Sometimes being surronded by everyone is the loneliest, because you'll realise you have no one to turn to. ~ Soraya, #NFDB |
| 158:The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes. ~ Celia Green, #NFDB |
| 159:But if you keep focusing on why you have it so bad, you'll never realise how you could have it so good. ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 160:I have to not take myself too seriously and I have to realise that if it is meant to be, it will be. ~ Teresa Palmer, #NFDB |
| 161:The majority of Aboriginals do not want handouts because they realise that welfare is killing them. ~ Pauline Hanson, #NFDB |
| 162:We're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realise we're in the wrong jungle. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB |
| 163:Where do people need to go so badly they can't realise what is already here, outside the car window ~ Daniel Wallace, #NFDB |
| 164:Who am I? Whence am I? On finding the source, you realise the state of Absolute Consciousness. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
165:You do realise modern social mores exist for a reason?"
"I was hungry, allowances should be made. ~ Gail Carriger,#NFDB |
| 166:It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB |
| 167:I was so beautiful but I didn't realise it for years. I saw pictures of myself and even I was stunned. ~ Britt Ekland, #NFDB |
| 168:No story sits by itself. Our lives connect like threads on a loom, interwoven in ways we never realise. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB |
| 169:You are an ordinary person till the day you realise that you have the power to change the world! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 170:Dont regret for people who left you in half,for you will realise in future that they never belonged to you ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 171:Everybody is very much alike, really. But fortunately, perhaps, they don't realise it. - Miss Marple ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB |
| 172:It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB |
| 173:The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realise the limitations of my sex. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 174:When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing. ~ David Hockney, #NFDB |
| 175:When you realise the mountain you've been climbing is just a heap of shit, the fall doesn't feel so far. ~ Ed McDonald, #NFDB |
| 176:I recognize my limits but when I look around I realise I am not living exactly in a world of giants. ~ Giulio Andreotti, #NFDB |
| 177:Paul Scholes is just fantastic. When you play alongside him, you realise what a special talent he is. ~ Michael Carrick, #NFDB |
| 178:Some people achieve the top of the ladder and only then realise it was standing against the wrong wall. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB |
| 179:The things we cannot realise today we shall be able to realise tomorrow. The only necessity is to endure.. ~ The Mother, #NFDB |
| 180:When you get to see the world, it changes you. You realise that there are all kinds of people out there. ~ Suraj Sharma, #NFDB |
| 181:John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB |
| 182:So what do you do when you build yourself up - only to realise you built yourself with the wrong things? ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB |
| 183:There is only one desire in life which is good and the desire for the means to realise it is also good. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 184:Think about how stupid the average person is; now realise half of them are dumber than that. - George Carlin ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 185:Being alone on the moors is scary; as the rain clouds settle in, it makes you realise your place in nature. ~ Dave Davies, #NFDB |
| 186:Once you realise there's nothing to be afraid of when you die, there's nothing else to worry about. ~ Michael Thomas Ford, #NFDB |
| 187:when a person really desires something,all the universe conspires to help that person realise his dream... ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
188:All sincere prayers are granted, but it may take some time to realise materially.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#NFDB |
| 189:In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.” At ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB |
| 190:Realise when you are 'middle aged' you have a chance for a whole second career, another love, another life. ~ Sharon Stone, #NFDB |
| 191:Success is within reach of all people, but you can grasp it only when you realise the power within you. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB |
| 192:We can realise a lasting peace and transform the East-West relationship to one of enduring co-operation. ~ George H W Bush, #NFDB |
| 193:But any man can lose his head. That's what they don't realise. Any man. Under the right set of circumstances ~ Stephen King, #NFDB |
| 194:Meditation is for you to realise that the deepest nature of your existence is beyond thoughts and emotions, ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB |
| 195:Directing made me realise what I do as an actor that's extraneous, it focuses your mind on story, story, story. ~ Matt Smith, #NFDB |
| 196:People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB |
| 197:Sometimes it is not until the Final Chapter that you realise what a quest has REALLY been about all along. ~ Cressida Cowell, #NFDB |
| 198:The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life. ~ Rowan Atkinson, #NFDB |
| 199:the questions a person asked often taught the hearer more about that person than they might realise. ~ Christopher G Nuttall, #NFDB |
| 200:They have a few drinks, and maybe the prawn sandwiches, and they don't realise what's going on out on the pitch. ~ Roy Keane, #NFDB |
| 201:When you're around enormously successful people you realise their success isn't an accident - it's about work. ~ Ryan Tedder, #NFDB |
202:His Grace is always with those who want to progress and realise the Truth of tomorrow.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother I,#NFDB |
| 203:I have a conviction that it's only when you are put at full stretch that you can realise your full potential. ~ Edward Dunlop, #NFDB |
| 204:It took a lot of time and practice for me to realise that there's no point trying to be something you're not. ~ Laura Marling, #NFDB |
| 205:People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB |
| 206:The nice thing about animation is that you can realise your inventions without understanding all the hard theory. ~ Nick Park, #NFDB |
| 207:What a thrill. You know you've entered new territory when you realise that your outfit cost more than your film. ~ Jessica Yu, #NFDB |
| 208:What use cities have for us? Their greatest use is to make us to realise the beauties of the rural life! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 209:If you are from an ordinary working class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise. ~ Theresa May, #NFDB |
| 210:Sometimes i think about having the power of invisibility, but then I realise it wouldn't really make a difference. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
211:You realise you’re going to owe me dinner after this, right?”
“How does McDonald’s sound?”
“Inadequate. ~ Sarah Mayberry,#NFDB |
| 212:Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB |
| 213:I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader. ~ Eoin Colfer, #NFDB |
| 214:It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn. ~ Gunter Grass, #NFDB |
| 215:One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB |
| 216:The thing is, you get used to it. Before you even realise it's happening, you get used to things being different... ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB |
| 217:Live, love, knowing that we're all free Now that we are blessed in our country And realise how lucky we are ~ Olivia Newton John, #NFDB |
| 218:my Master's message to mankind is: "Be spiritual and realise truth for Yourself." ~ Swami Vivekananda from C.W. Vol 4, My Master, #NFDB |
| 219:Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued. ~ Francis Ford Coppola, #NFDB |
| 220:The bad mood fairy comes to annoy you only when you are actually in a good position, but don't yet realise it! ~ Jonathan Cainer, #NFDB |
| 221:There are two types of dreams: one to realise, the other is to be there only to create hope, a direction, a reason. ~ Sara Alexi, #NFDB |
| 222:I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel, #NFDB |
| 223:I did that once,' he said. 'Gave everything I had to a badge. Then you realise one day how little it really means. ~ Scott Mariani, #NFDB |
224:Let this be our one need in life, to realise the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The True Aim of Life [3], #index,#NFDB |
| 225:Little did I realise how much I would miss those ten minutes, those ten minutes in which I lived an entire lifetime. ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB |
| 226:People tend to slip up and go along the old road before they realise what they've done and climb out of it again. ~ Philippa Perry, #NFDB |
| 227:Until one looks back on one's own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB |
| 228:At last you realise that a man is not an equal, but an alien force, bent on destruction when he is aroused to anger. ~ Penny Jordan, #NFDB |
| 229:I call a man rich man if his mind is full of dreams and his soul is full of resolution to realise these dreams! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 230:I thought I'd reached the bottom a few times, but then I'd realise there was another 30 floors of despair below that. ~ Trent Reznor, #NFDB |
| 231:People are intimidated when they first meet me, but it doesn't take them long to realise I'm just an average person. ~ Gloria Gaynor, #NFDB |
| 232:We are smart enough to realise that we are stupid, and stupid enough to make the problem of becoming smarter hard. ~ Anders Sandberg, #NFDB |
| 233:Champions realise that defeat - and learning from it even more than from winning - is part of the path to mastery. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru, #NFDB |
| 234:It’s a really crappy feeling to realise that your entire outlook on life can be controlled by some little pill. ~ Michael Thomas Ford, #NFDB |
| 235:How many of us dare not use our time or money or talents as we would, because we realise they are the Lord's, not ours? ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB |
| 236:Most of the fears in life are only the scarecrows; once you realise this, the field is all yours to benefit from! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 237:Sometimes you look back at girls you spent money on rather than send it to your mum and you realise witchcraft is real ~ Robert Mugabe, #NFDB |
| 238:Try to realise that there is no I, no you, no he, only the one Self which is all. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Conscious Immortality, Ch 15, #NFDB |
| 239:When you get a bit older and you realise that no one knows what they're doing, no one's perfect and it's fine. ~ Jessica Brown Findlay, #NFDB |
| 240:As you get older you realise that nothing lasts forever. It's not depressing, but it does make moments more intense. ~ Victoria Legrand, #NFDB |
| 241:Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB |
| 242:I must return to my freedom which I now realise is something so essential that it makes my love for you seem like death. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB |
| 243:To realise a progressive truth theories must be remoulded according to practice and not practice made to suit the theories. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 244:When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB |
| 245:You never realise the value of something until it's gone, hence why you should always appreciate the little things in life. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 246:I'd never even looked at a pair of skis. I didn't even realise the boots were separate. I thought it was one whole thing. ~ Chloe Madeley, #NFDB |
| 247:Little did he realise, in the foolishness of his youth, that the march of time consigns every moment to the past forever. ~ Joanne Clancy, #NFDB |
| 248:When I wake up on a Monday morning and I realise I don't have to go and work at the civil service, I really think I've won. ~ Paul Merton, #NFDB |
| 249:Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 250:I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 251:Not to be able to stop thinking is an affliction, but we don't realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB |
| 252:people need to cling to something,” Oshima says. “They have to. You’re doing the same, even though you don’t realise it. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB |
| 253:We spend so much time striving for status that we don’t realise it’s the people in our lives that bring us real happiness.” I ~ L H Cosway, #NFDB |
| 254:Stardom is no longer the fuel of my soul. It is the deeper aspects of life that nurture me. And I realise I am very blessed. ~ Sharon Stone, #NFDB |
| 255:Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 256:But as soon as you enter a village you realise that the churches which welcomed you from afar are no longer living. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB |
| 257:Only by so transcending the world of sense, can he reach his true Self and realise what he really is. ~ Swami Vivekananda from Jnana Yoga VI, #NFDB |
| 258:So many people fail to realise that the greatest journey one can ever take is the journey to the very centre of one’s being. ~ Susan Howatch, #NFDB |
| 259:All of them realise that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 260:Realise well, proud little man that even the highest clouds don't shine! For above all things there lie brightest stars. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 261:The moment we fully and vitally realise who and what we are, we then begin to build our own World even as God builds his. ~ Ralph Waldo Trine, #NFDB |
| 262:There is no question you get pumped up by the recognition. Then a self-loathing sets in when you realise you're enjoying it. ~ George C Scott, #NFDB |
| 263:You think you've been in deep shit before, and then you realise you have absolutely no conception of how deep shit can really be. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB |
| 264:An educated lower class was one that knew enough to realise that it was being exploited by its elders and betters. And ~ Christopher G Nuttall, #NFDB |
| 265:I'm still broken, aren't I? I guess I'm beginning to realise that I won't get over it. Death doesn't get better. Maybe life does. ~ Sarah Moss, #NFDB |
| 266:It was perturbing to look long at your reflection: to realise that all the time you were there in the world, visible, undeniable ~ Jude Morgan, #NFDB |
| 267:Nothing is more important than life. Nothing. You realise the simplicity of that point only when you confront death everyday. ~ Amish Tripathi, #NFDB |
| 268:Sunset is a cosmic call to us all to give a break to the rush of life so as to realise the gorgeousness of the existence! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 269:When you see the flower of happiness on your way, don’t take it immediately; sit and watch it and realise how rare it is! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 270:He gave me a hammer to hold and told me that when he nodded his head I was to hit it. So I did. I didn’t realise he meant the pipe. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 271:How disquieting to realise that reality is an illusion, at best a democratisation of perception based on participant consensus. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB |
| 272:I'm on my feet, pacing around the room, punching a fist into my palm, which I stop doing when I realise how drama queen it feels. ~ Eoin Colfer, #NFDB |
| 273:My Apprentice is a PathFinder," Septimus said. "I am beginning to realise that means she can go pretty much anywhere she wants to. ~ Angie Sage, #NFDB |
| 274:The man is strong. He's huge. But Alexei has something to fight for. And i realise with a start that the something is me. - Grace ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB |
275:There people fail to realise that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. - Pi Patel in Life of Pi
~ Yann Martel,#NFDB |
276:What is the right way of achieving lasting world unity?
To realise the Consciousness of the ONE.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#NFDB |
| 277:Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught we will realise we cannot eat money. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 278:Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
279:The Truth is in you - but you must want it, in order to realise it. With my Blessings.
~ The Mother, Mantras Of The Mother, August 29th, [T5],#NFDB |
280:When you realise that the distinction between inner and outer is in the mind only, you are no longer afraid.
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, [T5],#NFDB |
| 281:In my dreams you are standing right beside me, two hearts finally colliding, then i wake up and realise, realise, this is real life ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB |
| 282:It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB |
| 283:Some say that you know real love when you realise the only person in the world who can console you is the one who has hurt you. ~ Guillaume Musso, #NFDB |
| 284:When you realise that you possess within your self everything you need to promote your own success, the feeling is one of empowerment. ~ Jim Fixx, #NFDB |
285:Can You now say with certainty whether this supramental substance will help decisively to realise this new birth?
EVIDENTLY.
~ The Mother,#NFDB |
| 286:It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB |
| 287:I've been through a lot and I realise the future can't be controlled. I'm not worried. You can always learn to overcome difficulties. ~ Niki Lauda, #NFDB |
288:Wow,” she said. “Do you realise how wonderful you sound?”
“Yes, I do,” he said with a firm nod. “And I think I’m underappreciated. ~ Robyn Carr,#NFDB |
| 289:Before I know it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB |
| 290:But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realise their Personal Legend ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 291:Here is a beautiful dream: A never-ending journey! The holy purpose of science is to realise this dream for all living beings! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 292:I realise it’s going to happen. This girl of my dreams, this girl who is more like me than anyone I’ve ever met, wants to kiss me. ~ Simone Elkeles, #NFDB |
| 293:You never realise what loneliness is until it creeps up on you - like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually. ~ Elizabeth Haynes, #NFDB |
| 294:And when you realise that men produce about 1,500 sperm every second,2 the potential for changes to creep in to the genome is obvious. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB |
| 295:He's been to the brink and come back. I guess when you lose your pride, even for just a moment, you realise how much it means to you. ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB |
| 296:I think the deafness affects me more than I realise I think it makes me more tired. I loathe parties. I attend, smile and leave. ~ Stephanie Beacham, #NFDB |
| 297:I wonder if my entire life will be a series of moments in which I realise I'm an idiot long after I can actually do anything about it. ~ Sabaa Tahir, #NFDB |
| 298:We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB |
| 299:I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB |
| 300:In reality there are no limitations. They are vibrant and changeable to whatever form you want them to take to realise your goals. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB |
| 301:I realise I'm behind on this but Rebekah Brooks was married to Ross Kemp of Gangs fame?! And she assaulted him? That explains so much. ~ Mandy Wiener, #NFDB |
| 302:So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s! ~ Cee Lo Green, #NFDB |
| 303:When you have children, you realise you can't plan anything. There's no Plan A, no Plan B. Life will happen and you will go with it. ~ Jennifer Lopez, #NFDB |
304:He reached out with his good hand, cupping her chin.
"Gretchen, don't you realise by now I would give up everything to be with you? ~ Anne Blankman,#NFDB |
| 305:If I pop off and do something drastic, everyone's going to realise because they know I'm 50. Anyway, middle-aged women are sensational. ~ Samantha Bond, #NFDB |
| 306:I'm surprised, but I'm glad, I realise that this is what i wanted that night last week, to simply make a connection and keep hold of it. ~ Jon McGregor, #NFDB |
307:The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realise the Self.
There is nothing else to do. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 219,#NFDB |
| 308:There is only the One. Try to realise there is no I, no you, no he, only the one Self which is all. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Conscious Immortality, [T5], #NFDB |
| 309:Tips for Southern Visitors, No. 5 People will be quite kind to you when they realise you are from the South, because you can’t help it. ~ Trisha Ashley, #NFDB |
| 310:Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. ~ Ian Hacking, #NFDB |
| 311:For the first time in my life I'm really happy to be unattached because I realise there is so much responsibility to having a partner. ~ Amanda Seyfried, #NFDB |
| 312:I've come to realise that the real magic is when you live a life in which others, not just yourself, truly benefit for you living it. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru, #NFDB |
| 313:Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake. ~ Bjork, #NFDB |
| 314:To be above the mind one must first realise the self above the mind and live there. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Ascent to the Higher Planes, #NFDB |
| 315:Well, he told me you were a flirt who would try and get me into bed, but damn, I didn’t realise you’d start before nine in the morning. ~ Kirsty Moseley, #NFDB |
| 316:Everyone wants to be a movie star or a model, to be in the papers, but few realise just what hard work it is, getting up early, and so on. ~ Helen Mirren, #NFDB |
| 317:I tend to write things and review it afterwards and realise what comes out. I very rarely ever write something and have to take it back. ~ Ellie Goulding, #NFDB |
| 318:Living in New York, you get a lot of confidence; when I go back to Michigan, I realise how obnoxious and demanding and straightforward I am. ~ Angel Haze, #NFDB |
| 319:After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
320:Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do
perfectly well. ~ Colin Wilson,#NFDB |
| 321:I like singer-songwriters, and I find sad songs comforting rather than depressing. It makes you realise you're not alone in the world. ~ Natalie Imbruglia, #NFDB |
| 322:I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it. ~ Tahir Shah, #NFDB |
| 323:Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church. Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks. No, I realise. It's the reverse. ~ Scarlett Thomas, #NFDB |
| 324:People come up to me and they're usually nice, but as it goes on you realise that some people aren't nice. Some people are not nice at all. ~ James McAvoy, #NFDB |
| 325:To realise the Self is to realise the eternal freedom of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #NFDB |
| 326:When we realise our oneness with our RULER, then the matter shall have no longer power over us, and we shall see it as the unreality it is. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB |
| 327:Being homeless is awful, but if you've ever tried to wrestle a duvet cover back onto a comforter you realise it's not without it's benefits. ~ Dov Davidoff, #NFDB |
| 328:I am never usually taking myself too seriously and I think that people when they read stuff from me, they have to realise that I'm having fun. ~ Katy Perry, #NFDB |
| 329:If you don't fully take every moment and love every moment and every person that you're with, your life will be over before you realise. ~ Jessica Chastain, #NFDB |
| 330:One day you look out and the audience consists of 65,000 people. It's like looking in the mirror and one day you realise you've gone grey. ~ Patrick Carney, #NFDB |
| 331:Only then did I realise that for me, and many others, Israel was virtual. For Murad, Israel was 'home.' Israel was a reality; a harsh reality. ~ Suad Amiry, #NFDB |
| 332:Well, a sort of epiphany: I was in a great band. And it's very cool to be at 53 and realise that when you were a kid you were in a great band. ~ Bob Geldof, #NFDB |
| 333:People don't realise that to be free means to be firmly attached to a system, that discipline is the road to a higher freedom. ~ Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, #NFDB |
| 334:They say that we come from apes and maybe it is the residing animal in us that knows things deep down that we almost don’t realise we know. ~ Sebastian Barry, #NFDB |
335:What is God?
God is the perfection that we must aspire to realise. 8 November 1969
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, "The Divine" and "Man" [17],#NFDB |
| 336:You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. ~ Lily King, #NFDB |
| 337:You're pretending this isn't your life. You think it's going to happen some other time. When you're dead you'll realise you were alive now. ~ Caryl Churchill, #NFDB |
| 338:All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good, #NFDB |
| 339:And every night I thought of you. Now that I can no longer see you, I realise how much I need you. Everything seems pointless since you left. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB |
| 340:Before I knew it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that everday I look less the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen. (The Angel's Game) ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB |
| 341:Dyslexia, though, made me realise that people who say "but you can't do that" aren't actually very important. I don't take "no" too seriously. ~ Richard Rogers, #NFDB |
| 342:I realise people exist who don't read. But it's like I knew there were people who didn't breathe or eat: I can't imagine a life like that. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan, #NFDB |
| 343:I thought if I could make people laugh about how awkward I am, it'd make me less awkward. But you also realise how fun it is to make people laugh. ~ Josie Long, #NFDB |
| 344:One day you will realise that there is no wind, and the flag does not move," he said. "It is only the hearts and minds of men that are restless. ~ Tan Twan Eng, #NFDB |
| 345:You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB |
| 346:All too soon will Childhood gay Realise Life's sober sadness. Let's be merry while we may, Innocent and happy Fay! Elves were made for gladness! ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB |
| 347:But what I didn’t realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 348:It's one of those hard truths in life, isn't it, when you realise that just because you love someone doesn't mean you'll always agree and get along? ~ H Y Hanna, #NFDB |
| 349:Mumbai Indians will strive to build on our proud legacy of giving youngsters a platform to showcase their talent and realise their true potential. ~ Nita Ambani, #NFDB |
| 350:The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for Nature to realise. ~ Louis Agassiz, #NFDB |
| 351:When you are around people who have money, you realise money isn't that impressive, it's about your class, morals and how you conduct yourself. ~ Anthony Joshua, #NFDB |
| 352:I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB |
| 353:People need to realise what real happiness and success is, because success as an actor is fleeting. You can be up there one day and gone the next. ~ Chuck Norris, #NFDB |
| 354:All they needed to do was look up close at what it was they were afraid of and they'd probably realise that it wasn't so frightening after all. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB |
| 355:It is important to realise that two conflicting statements can both be equally true depending on the level from which you observe the same situation. ~ David Icke, #NFDB |
| 356:To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB |
| 357:Actually, you are destined to reach the point where you realise that through your own desire you can consciously create your successive destinies ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB |
358:But I'm a wanted fugitive, like Cinder." Thorne continued. "They do realise I'm missing, don't they?"
"Maybe they're grateful," Cinder muttered. ~ Marissa Meyer,#NFDB |
| 359:You see—I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB |
| 360:Few males achieve any real freedom in their sexual relations even with their wives. Few males realise how badly inhibited they are on these matters. ~ Alfred Kinsey, #NFDB |
361:Him: And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realise you'll eventually lose everyone
Me: True. And once you know that, you can never forget it. ~ John Green,#NFDB |
| 362:It was good to be a kid because I did not realise all the things that came with the success. Going to the Games, I was asked what I expected to do. ~ Nadia Comaneci, #NFDB |
| 363:The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know. Still, the struggle itself is worthwhile. Knowledge is the root of power, after all. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB |
| 364:We're like . . . like dinosaurs bedazzled by all the pretty lights in the sky, too fucking stupid to realise it's a comet getting closer and closer. ~ Philip Ridley, #NFDB |
| 365:Woman, I hold, is the personification of self-sacrifice, but unfortunately today she does not realise what a tremendous advantage she has over man. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 366:Donald Trump ought to realise that being a president is different to being a candidate and that there is a responsibility that comes with the office. ~ Julian Castro, #NFDB |
| 367:The more you learn, I think the more you realise who you are and what you want and what you believe and what you want to be and where you want to end up. ~ Kate Nash, #NFDB |
| 368:Understand why you are different and how you help, recognise your target market, and give them something they might not even realise they are missing. ~ Chris Murray, #NFDB |
| 369:You got to realise that when I was 20 years old, I had a house, a Mercedes, a Corvette and a million dollars in the bank before I could buy alcohol legally. ~ Dr Dre, #NFDB |
370:All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good, 148,#NFDB |
| 371:At least until you land.’ ‘I’ve come to realise that falling and living have certain things in common. For a start, both are very temporary states of being. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB |
| 372:I feel acutely aware of how young I am. In a way that is good. It's productive. It makes me realise that I should be growing as a writer and a person. ~ Veronica Roth, #NFDB |
| 373:Irreducible complexity is a problem for Darwinian evolution. Whenever we see these complex functional systems we realise that they have to be designed. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB |
| 374:It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives. ~ Viggo Mortensen, #NFDB |
| 375:Many people don't realise until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB |
| 376:Realise that man is comparable to the brute creation except when uplifted by the loving Covenant initiated with our Patriarchs. ~ Immanuel Jakobovits Baron Jakobovits, #NFDB |
| 377:When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 378:You can't realise love or yourself until you are still enough to drop down through the restlessness and frustrations into that deeper level of your being ~ Barry Long, #NFDB |
| 379:I almost gasp out loud when I realise: Who I am is what I choose to do. Just like Mum. Who she is, at her core, is made up of all the decisions she makes. ~ Teri Terry, #NFDB |
| 380:I can never bring you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB |
| 381:It took me to about maybe 16, 17 or 18 or something to realise I was absolutely useless at everything else except for playing guitar and writing words ~ Noel Gallagher, #NFDB |
| 382:You cannot create new science unless you realise where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB |
| 383:I didn't actually realise what apartheid meant. I'm probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses. ~ John Deacon, #NFDB |
384:Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.
Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.
No, I realise. It's the reverse. ~ Scarlett Thomas,#NFDB |
| 385:She had felt petrified when she saw him coming towards her, terrified that he might realise how much she loved him, how eagerly she had waited for him... ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 386:That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more. ~ Stephen Bayley, #NFDB |
| 387:The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge. No real knowledge is common. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
| 388:When you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realise that there are lots of things you want to do before your life is over. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB |
| 389:[About being a teenager] Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time. ~ Lana Del Rey, #NFDB |
| 390:Like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognize danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise... ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 391:Most of all it kept my mind off the growing sense that I'd been to the worst place on the planet only to realise that the worst place of all was inside me. ~ Philip Kerr, #NFDB |
392:Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.
Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.
No, I realise. It's the reverse. ~ Scarlett Thomas,#NFDB |
| 393:Russia must realise its full potential in high-tech sectors such as modern energy technology, transport and communications, space and aircraft building. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB |
| 394:As one looks across the barren stretches of the pack, it is sometimes difficult to realise what teeming life exists immediately beneath its surface. ~ Robert Falcon Scott, #NFDB |
395:I suddenly realise that it doesn't matter how far I go, or how lost I am, or how lonely I feel. I fit in here. I always will.
That's how I know I'm home. ~ Holly Smale,#NFDB |
| 396:There was a time when I didn't like myself at all. I thought I was a cruel joke. But now I've come to realise that maybe I am not cute, but I am beautiful. ~ Cee Lo Green, #NFDB |
| 397:What we have here is good and if you’d get over your thoughts that it isn’t gonna last, you’d realise how much better it’s gonna get if you’d just relax. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB |
| 398:You smoked another cigarette and we shared another coffee and it was just another morning that made me realise that this is all it takes to be happy. ~ Charlotte Eriksson, #NFDB |
| 399:all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 400:Before all this is over... are we going to hate ourselves? Or are we just going to get used to things, so that we don’t realise what we’re turning into? ~ John Christopher, #NFDB |
| 401:I didn't realise how important stupid people are in your life, because you ask yourself, what made stupid people so stupid? What made them the way they are? ~ Simon Cowell, #NFDB |
402:The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge.
No real knowledge is common. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB |
| 403:The sight of Imran [Khan] tearing fearsomely down the hill and the baying of the crowd made me realise for the first time that adrenalin was sometimes brown ~ Simon Hughes, #NFDB |
| 404:When I woke up in the morning and look in the mirror I realise that one of the reasons I don't own a handgun is, I would have shot my thighs off years ago. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB |
| 405:Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom... ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 406:Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realise that reciting red indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet. ~ Banksy, #NFDB |
| 407:The aim of the Universal Mother is to embrace the Divine in her own play and creations and there to realise It. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Systems of Yoga, #NFDB |
| 408:Ephemeral relationships like that just happen, programmed from the outset to die after a brief period – but you only realise that as they are about to end. ~ Antoine Laurain, #NFDB |
| 409:His accent is kind of irresistible, she says. It makes him feel a little lonely to realise how easy it is to be liked by someone who has no idea who he is. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB |
410:You need to realise how gorgeous you are.'
She laughs, but I’m not trying to be funny. ‘I mean it Flo, you really are. Somewhere under all that disbelief. ~ Dawn O Porter,#NFDB |
| 411:And I realise, every day, that things I lack, confidence, grace, beauty, intelligence, wit-oh, all the qualities that mean most in a woman- she possessed. ~ Daphne du Maurier, #NFDB |
| 412:Difficulties in your life do not come to destroy you, but to help you realise your hidden potential and power, let difficulties know that you too are difficult. ~ Abdul Kalam, #NFDB |
| 413:Fame doesn't redeem you. It takes a long time to get there, and when you're finally there, you realise you still have authority figures telling you what to do. ~ Cyndi Lauper, #NFDB |
| 414:I meet people who are famous, and it's made me realise that fame has huge lifestyle disadvantages. I'm nervous about that. I don't want to become a celebrity. ~ Tom Hollander, #NFDB |
| 415:In my own life, I decided to leave meat off my plate in medical school, but was a bit slow to realise that dairy products and eggs are not health foods either. ~ Neal Barnard, #NFDB |
| 416:Love is a decision?’ ‘That’s right. A decision. Not a feeling. That’s what you young people don’t realise. That’s why you’re always off divorcing each other. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB |
| 417:No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognise danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 418:The most perfect day is the day on which you fully realise that everything is a miracle including yourself and feel so happy just because of this reason! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 419:There is a moment when you realise you are not doing what you want to do or being who you want to be. It is at that moment that you become who you really are. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB |
| 420:When I started to realise how important the film was to people I thought there is a lot of negative stuff going on in the world, maybe they need these two people ~ Jim Carrey, #NFDB |
| 421:If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB |
| 422:But, when tales of the cosmos are told, this period of ours may always be recalled as that in which men first came to realise what a violent universe we inhabit. ~ Nigel Calder, #NFDB |
423:I'm beginning to realise that things don't turn out the way you want them to.
And sometimes, when they don't, they can turn out just a little bit better. ~ Melina Marchetta,#NFDB |
| 424:Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war. ~ Kamal Haasan, #NFDB |
| 425:I don't think we realise just how fast we go until you stop for a minute and realise just how loud and how hectic your life is, and how easily distracted you can get. ~ Meg Ryan, #NFDB |
| 426:I've never really been very good at marriage. It's one of my failures. I've tried my best, but I do realise the common denominator is me; it's something I'm doing. ~ Len Goodman, #NFDB |
| 427:Man is the ultimate tragic being, because he has learned enough about the Earth to realise the Earth would be better off without the presence of humankind. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe, #NFDB |
| 428:The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted ~ Galen, #NFDB |
| 429:Sometimes, you just have to take a step back and realise what's important in your life, what you can live with, and more importantly, what you can't live without. ~ Lauren Conrad, #NFDB |
| 430:The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don’t know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 431:Brutally, I’d begun to realise that until one had experienced loss and deep pain oneself, it was impossible to truly empathise with others in the same predicament. ~ Lucinda Riley, #NFDB |
| 432:I said (to Daniel Jones), 'You realise I'm always going to be The Guy From Savage Garden'. He said, 'How do you think I feel? I'm The Other One From Savage Garden!' ~ Darren Hayes, #NFDB |
| 433:It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as ‘the career women’s disease’. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB |
| 434:The Afghan War has clearly reached a stage similar to that moment at your child's party where you realise you've forgotten to give the other parents a pick up time. ~ Jeremy Hardy, #NFDB |
| 435:Yes, I hate what I am at times, but at least I accept myself enough to realise that I can’t lie my way through life, pretending to prefer women when I don’t.” At ~ Joanna Chambers, #NFDB |
| 436:Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
| 437:Islam expect every Muslim to do this duty, and if we realise our responsibility time will come soon when we shall justify ourselves worthy of a glorious past. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB |
| 438:Lady Maria’s charity-knitting which she had taken up. Emily was so gratified that she found conversation easy. She did not realise that at that particular ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, #NFDB |
| 439:Many are the names of God and infinite the forms through which He may be approached. In whatever name and form you worship Him, through that you will realise Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB |
| 440:Our performance during this World Cup has not been enough to progress further and both myself and all the players regret that and are hurt more than people realise. ~ David Beckham, #NFDB |
| 441:Spirit is the soul and reality of that which we sense as Matter; Matter is a form and body of that which we realise as Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Knot of Matter, #NFDB |
442:The things we cannot realise today we shall be able to realise tomorrow. The only necessity is to endure. With my Blessings.
~ The Mother, Mantras Of The Mother, 20 August, [T5],#NFDB |
| 443:You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care. ~ Dustin Hoffman, #NFDB |
| 444:Almost 70 per cent of your fitness battle is won the day you realise what your body needs and when. I've made my own diets, and I decide for myself what works for me. ~ Arjun Rampal, #NFDB |
| 445:I don't think that ambition should not be in the dictionary of entrepreneurs. But our ambition should be realistic. You have to realise that you can't do everything. ~ Mukesh Ambani, #NFDB |
| 446:Sometimes it's better to live through someone's work than the person themselves, and to realise that every human being is flawed, but through art they can be perfect. ~ Emily Haines, #NFDB |
| 447:When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level. ~ Ben Marcus, #NFDB |
| 448:When I was young I thought: when I am 60 my necessities will be very different. As I get near that age, I realise they are similar to what they were when I was 25. ~ Pedro Almodovar, #NFDB |
449:Happiness is not the aim of life. The aim of ordinary life is to carry out one's duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, 26,#NFDB |
| 450:I asked you here tonight because when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB |
| 451:Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB |
| 452:We look at each other a second. " I'm tired of the rules," I say. Aibileen chuckles and looks out the window. I realise how thin this revelation must sound to her. ~ Kathryn Stockett, #NFDB |
| 453:Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt. ~ Elizabeth Bowen, #NFDB |
| 454:This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 455:You will desperately realise the necessity of casting anchor to somewhere or being chained to someone or something when you are drifting in the emptiness of life! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 456:And I hope America will realise, as the only superpower now, it really must use its power in a way that's going to build up the world, and to support the United Nations. ~ George Carey, #NFDB |
| 457:By bringing Little Sun to Tate Modern and the London Olympics, I hope to realise an art project for those who typically have no access to global events of this scale. ~ Olafur Eliasson, #NFDB |
| 458:Everybody has God inside, but not everybody is able to see God within. One can see God only when one cries for Him. Those who cry for God and pray to God can realise God. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB |
| 459:I'm sorry about dragging you into my evil schemes with my masculine wiles. I didn't realise, um, the force of my own wiliness. I don't actually use my wiles a lot. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan, #NFDB |
| 460:It’s important to realise that margin requirements can and do change from time to time, and also more importantly when holding positions overnight and also at weekends. ~ Anna Coulling, #NFDB |
| 461:Many are the names of God and infinite are the forms through which He may be approached. In whatever name and form you worship Him, through them you will realise Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB |
| 462:More are the names of God and infinite are the forms through which He may be approached. In whatever name and form you worship Him, through them you will realise Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB |
| 463:Standing, as I do, in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone (On the eve of her execution) ~ Edith Cavell, #NFDB |
464:...such are the dreams of youth, too gloriously stupid to realise what cannot be done.
And without those dreams, how should we ever accomplish the impossible? ~ Elizabeth Kerner,#NFDB |
| 465:The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else. ~ Tim Berners Lee, #NFDB |
| 466:How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die ~ Vera Brittain, #NFDB |
| 467:I haven't had ice-cream in a year, although I did have a slice of pizza. People don't realise that when you're shooting a movie it's only three months to get in shape for. ~ Mike Colter, #NFDB |
| 468:It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are. —GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB |
| 469:I turn on the TV sometimes, start watching something and think: 'This seems quite good, a bit familiar.' Then I realise … It's one of my movies. It's a pretty odd feeling. ~ Alan Parker, #NFDB |
| 470:...sometimes it's moments like that, real, complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realise that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB |
| 471:To realise one's Personal Legend is a person's only real obligation. All things are one. And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 472:...you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB |
| 473:Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB |
| 474:I don’t think you realise how much you like him Brenna. I think it’s ridiculous and irritating, especially considering what you could have right here, but I’m not judging. ~ Liz Reinhardt, #NFDB |
| 475:I've never had a love letter before. Not from anyone. It is a most wonderful thing to receive. I realise that it makes a present to me of your life, not just your love. ~ Anthony McDonald, #NFDB |
| 476:So as a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior. ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB |
| 477:Some people come to Old Trafford and can't spell football, let alone understand it. They have a few drinks and a prawn sandwich but don't realise what's happening on the pitch ~ Roy Keane, #NFDB |
| 478:The rules are rather simple to understand: Under democracy you can defend any view, but only defend it. You can not try to realise it through power, violence or weapons. ~ Poul Henningsen, #NFDB |
| 479:...the seaside life and the life of travel made me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 480:The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and now I don't think I can bear it any more. The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed. ~ Sara Baume, #NFDB |
| 481:You realise that having a number one record and being loved and adored isn't the most important thing in the world. But at the same time, I don't have a problem with it. ~ Madonna Ciccone, #NFDB |
| 482:You realise that people actually have to live in among all this and that east London is the bill, the tab that these cunts are picking up so that you can live in west London. ~ John Niven, #NFDB |
| 483:You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected. ~ Peter Morgan, #NFDB |
| 484:I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof. ~ David Nicholls, #NFDB |
| 485:The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world belongs to all its creatures. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB |
| 486:We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 487:Did you ever look down at yourself and realise that finally you had it all? Did you ever feel that everything was so right in your life you'd have nowhere to go but downhill? ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB |
| 488:I realise it’s not important who owns the physical structure or where it’s located, it’s the person you love – the bond you’ve built – that will shelter you when you need it. ~ Talli Roland, #NFDB |
| 489:I remember reading a book where some pretentious writer claimed there's no moment of enlightenment more terrible than when you realise your parents are simple human beings. ~ Benedict Jacka, #NFDB |
| 490:Limitations are like mirages created by your own mind. When you realise that limitation do not exist, those around you will also feel it and allow you inside their space. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB |
| 491:Once you have done with school, you realise that it is just a smaller version of life, and really I have felt that I should have been an adult since I was aged about five. ~ Kristen Stewart, #NFDB |
| 492:She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the Sturm und Drang going on in the apartment. Funny how you realise that only after you become a parent yourself. ~ Maggie O Farrell, #NFDB |
| 493:You can do the same thing with $20 million that you would do with $50 million. So at a certain point in your life and in your career, you realise that it's not about the money. ~ Kevin Hart, #NFDB |
| 494:Even though you get a little twinge every now and again with the years marching on and become aware of your own mortality, you realise you're only limited by your imagination. ~ Ita Buttrose, #NFDB |
| 495:I have half a dozen designers who work for me, they 'realise' most of the design work, and I act as the design director and the main point of client contact on each project. ~ Michael Bierut, #NFDB |
| 496:I realise that you are, like, bursting with a constant need to rub yourself up against girl flesh or whatever, but can you just try to talk about it a little less in front of me ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 497:Seventy years after Marx’s death, one third of the human race lived under regimes ruled by communist parties which claimed to represent his ideas and realise his aspirations. ~ Eric Hobsbawm, #NFDB |
| 498:The day you realise how fragile your civilisation across the natural forces is, it may be too late to build a sounder one! All realisations must happen today, right now! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 499:The only way to be sure is to go out and test your ideas and programmes, and to realise that you will often be wrong. But that is not a bad thing. It leads to progress. This ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB |
| 500:There are times when after conquering one significant milestone in the journey,we realise the benign ignorance we had about the colossal challenges posed by the next milestone. ~ Varun Sayal, #NFDB |
501:This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly
into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it's been there for a long time. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,#NFDB |
| 502:At times I ask myself if I shouldnt be living a more regular, stable life with a 9-to-5 job. Then I think about it and realise that there is no point in planning everything. ~ Meredith Ostrom, #NFDB |
| 503:If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct. ~ Saul Williams, #NFDB |
| 504:If you always think about your dreams or goals, work steadfastly towards them and continue to challenge yourself, you will definitely be able to realise those dreams or goals. ~ Tadashi Yanai, #NFDB |
| 505:In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage. ~ Penelope Lively, #NFDB |
| 506:We have to realise the true self of ourselves and of all; and to realise the true self is to realise Sachchidananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Realisation of Sachchidananda, #NFDB |
| 507:What you don't realise at the time is that you're not seeing the full picture," Peter went on. "You don't think about the fact that things will change. Things always change. ~ Maureen Johnson, #NFDB |
| 508:I realise now that I wanted to disappear. To get so lost that nobody ever found me. To go so far away that I'd never be able to make my way home again. But I have no idea why. ~ Jessica Warman, #NFDB |
| 509:Humanity came first for him, not a political party or movement, and he believed peace could be achieved only if people were given freedom to realise their humanitarian impulses. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB |
| 510:I'm terrible at relationships. I consider myself to be smart and a good mother but it's taken me this long to realise you don't have to marry a guy after three days or dump him. ~ Sheena Easton, #NFDB |
| 511:I realise few people get to live the life they always wanted, but I'm so neurotic, I don't really think about it. I'm too busy thinking, 'I hope I don't screw up my next scene. ~ Charlie Hunnam, #NFDB |
| 512:I think I have become a better writer since having children. It improves creativity, particularly because once you have children it makes you realise the story isn’t about you. ~ Louise Doughty, #NFDB |
| 513:I wasn't good at being affable. You get beyond that and realise the attraction in any human being has more to do with what they give to someone rather than just being face candy. ~ Alison Moyet, #NFDB |
| 514:When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters. ~ Jonathan Meades, #NFDB |
| 515:By definition, an actor's life is a recipe for regret. There are always roads you could have taken. But I've lived long enough to realise that each road has its own rewards. ~ Elizabeth McGovern, #NFDB |
| 516:In a big city you become a ghost; you walk on the crowded streets and realise that you are a kind of transparent entity; an indistinct being, a thing which is not something! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 517:The long list of possibilities makes us realise just how many obstacles to happiness exist; in short, there are more bad things than good – and they are far more consequential. In ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB |
| 518:The New Year is not a time to think about what you have lost or what you could have achieved but it is a time to plan and realise what you can gain and what you can achieve! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 519:We had so much in common [with June Hillary] that we just carried on with life as we had been doing. It wasn't easy, but it was - I realise now that it was the only thing to do. ~ Edmund Hillary, #NFDB |
| 520:Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB |
| 521:Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon, #NFDB |
| 522:Here is a wonderful habit: From time to time stop; move not; speak not; just watch the nature, because this is the best way to realise explicitly the miracles surrounding us! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 523:I bought it [sha la la la lee] because of steve marriotts voice. I didnt realise until recently it was written by kenny lynch. I'm not at all embarrassed, great song and great band. ~ Carl Palmer, #NFDB |
| 524:The relief of being at last engaged in the execution of the purpose, was so great to me that I felt it difficult to realise the condition in which I had been a few hours before. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB |
525:Do you realise…” she whispered. “Do you know what loving you would mean for me? For my life?”
“Yes.” He kissed her lips gently, then he whispered in her ear, “Love me anyway. ~ Elizabeth Hunter,#NFDB |
| 526:In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not. ~ Ayad Akhtar, #NFDB |
| 527:Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she’s more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn’t. ~ Sophie Hannah, #NFDB |
| 528:I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB |
| 529:The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB |
| 530:A dozen incidents of this kind made everyone realise that the monsters had never left them, that they had simply fallen asleep for a while, and that now their slumbers were over. ~ Philippe Claudel, #NFDB |
| 531:If you close your eyes in a park you will realise that everything you see around is at the same time in the air because everything has a scent and every scent is a misty image! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 532:I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB |
| 533:Might it also be that creating narratives around murder allows a measure of comfort? Murder in the abstract is terrifying; in the details, you realise it has nothing to do with you. ~ Emily Maguire, #NFDB |
| 534:At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB |
| 535:I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer. ~ Jenny Agutter, #NFDB |
| 536:It took me a long time to realise that I was a girl as a teenager. At that point I never really believed it. I looked like a boy for a long time. Now, finally, I feel like a woman. ~ Kristen Stewart, #NFDB |
| 537:I was starting to realise, which isn’t to say I was transitioning from one thing to another, but rather that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn’t exist, except there I was. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB |
| 538:Nothing said Clothes to Wear When You Want to Impress a Guy You Initially Shot Down, But Now You Realise You Like Him and Want to Get Him Back. Where was the outfit for that? ~ Kristin Walker, #NFDB |
| 539:Real friends are very special, but you have to be careful because sometimes you have a friend and you think they are made of rock, then suddenly you realise they're only made of sand. ~ Maria Callas, #NFDB |
| 540:You have to realise that I am the third out of six children, and I am raised with very strong core values and a very strong upbringing. I always put myself in other people's shoes. ~ Angela Ahrendts, #NFDB |
| 541:After you free yourself from the incredible expectations of love through the media from the time you were so high, you realise that it's the spaces between the notes that make music. ~ Hector Elizondo, #NFDB |
| 542:I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB |
543:In the Divine's light we shall see, in the Divine's knowledge we shall know, in the Divine's will we shall realise. 1 October 1954
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The Divine Is with You, [T1],#NFDB |
| 544:It was nothing more than the instinct of sociability, but it made me realise how long it had been since I’d been smiled at by a stranger. How long since I’d had someone to smile back to. ~ Alexis Hall, #NFDB |
| 545:It will be obvious to anyone who sees it that he [Doctor Strange] earns that cloak. You think he's doing all right and then you realise that there's one massive lesson to learn. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch, #NFDB |
546:Oh, for Thor's sake..." said Hiccup. "I thought that was just a story..."
"Stories come from somewhere," said the witch. "The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise. ~ Cressida Cowell,#NFDB |
| 547:So many people appreciate what you've done, the doors you've opened, but some people realise they're not going to be able to make as much money as they thought possible when you first started. ~ Nelly, #NFDB |
| 548:The biographies are very enlightening because you realise, "Oh my God, all these people I’ve admired - and tried to emulate even - when I was younger died tragically from substance abuse. ~ Eva Mendes, #NFDB |
| 549:Very quickly I begin to understand the selfishness of my love, the inappropriateness of my relationships, when I realise that every time I fuck it feels as if I am wrestling with demons. ~ Luke Davies, #NFDB |
| 550:All of a sudden you may realise that you are no longer young! And at that moment, you must also realise that by refusing getting old you can catch a chance to continue to be young! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 551:For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 552:A year ago… Eighteen months ago even but not now! Don’t you realise that this is too little too late?” She shook her head in frustration. “It’s like putting a band-aid on an amputation! ~ Natasha Anders, #NFDB |
| 553:Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people`s plates. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB |
| 554:When people say to me don't the years go fast I have to be honest and say that whereas I don't realise where they go in the long term, I pack so much into a year it seems to take forever. ~ Paul Daniels, #NFDB |
| 555:When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much. ~ John Cleese, #NFDB |
| 556:My mother had no education and perhaps that was the reason that she always encouraged us to go to school. ‘Don’t wake up like me and realise what you missed years later,’ she says. She ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB |
| 557:she had come to realise of late that when one faced oneself, one found some displeasing facets, and one of them was a strong will, which became wilfulness when displayed at Amy’s age. ~ Catherine Cookson, #NFDB |
| 558:So that was why people read. Because books explained things: how you thought, and how you behaved, and made you realise you were not alone in doing what you did or feeling what you felt. ~ Veronica Henry, #NFDB |
| 559:I know Caraval can be magical and romantic and wonderful, but the spells it casts aren’t easily shaken off, and half the time I don’t even think people realise they have been bewitched. ~ Stephanie Garber, #NFDB |
| 560:I'm a spy, Cam. I was born to do this- to be this. It's in my blood. And I will do it until the day I die. It's who I am... The thing is I don't think you realise is... it's who you are too. ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB |
| 561:Your trials did not come to punish you, but to awaken you - to make you realise that you are a part of Spirit and that just behind the sparks of your life is the Flame of Infinity. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB |
| 562:A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB |
| 563:And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB |
| 564:Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …’ I’m drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But ~ Scarlett Thomas, #NFDB |
| 565:Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator. ~ Will Self, #NFDB |
| 566:Cate's absolutely spellbinding. She was like that just eating a sandwich. I knew at the time I was privileged, but since she's become God's gift to actresses I realise exactly how lucky I was. ~ Emily Blunt, #NFDB |
| 567:Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realise that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 568:I used to look at Jinks and marvel at her smooth complexion, but over the years I have come to realise that she has been spared wrinkles by virtue of never having succumbed to heavy thought. ~ Sandi Toksvig, #NFDB |
| 569:There is no mind to control if you realise the self. The mind having vanished, the self shines forth. In the realised man, the mind may be active or inactive, the self remains for him. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
570:Ah realise now thit death is usually a process, rather than an
event. People generally die by degrees, incrementally. They rot away slowly in homes and hoespitals,
or places like this. ~ Irvine Welsh,#NFDB |
| 571:Anorexia taught me to love life and to realise that starving yourself to death is a bloody waste of time. It's awful and it hurts so many people around you. It's a terribly selfish thing to do. ~ Celia Imrie, #NFDB |
| 572:It is astonishing to realise that the human species survived hundreds of thousands of years, more than 99 percent of its time on this planet, with a life expectancy of only eighteen years. ~ Leonard Hayflick, #NFDB |
| 573:Stand like a restful mountain in front of people so that they can realise the foolish complexities and the meaningless fusses in their lives and thus find some peace in your tranquillity! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 574:As I paint, I realise, while it's something I do very much by myself, it's very solitary, the creative process feels similar to making music to me now, at least as far as my brain is concerned. ~ Black Francis, #NFDB |
| 575:As she took each step a little bubble of wind puffed out of her saggy bottom. It sounded like a duck quacking. Either she didn’t realise or was extremely good at pretending she didn’t realise. ~ David Walliams, #NFDB |
| 576:During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba. ~ Amin Maalouf, #NFDB |
| 577:In the deep sleep state we lay down our ego, our thoughts and our desires. If we could only do all this while we are conscious, we would realise the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Conscious Immortality, Ch. 13, #NFDB |
| 578:It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life. It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing. ~ Lou Doillon, #NFDB |
| 579:She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant. ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB |
| 580:Sometimes you have to realise that things will never change if you don’t make a change yourself, and sometimes, you need to realise that it only happened so that you could learn something. ~ Charlotte Eriksson, #NFDB |
| 581:When you are young nothing is more important than football but as you get older, you get married, have kids and lose people. Then you realise your family is more important. This comes with age. ~ Jermain Defoe, #NFDB |
| 582:You wonder why, after all this, Hashim stays in India. ‘There’s no country freer than India and people don’t realise it,’ Hashim said. ‘You can pee anywhere you like and nothing will happen to you. ~ A S Dulat, #NFDB |
| 583:I could take back those moments that snatched you away from me or maybe just wipe away those ten minutes when you came to me for the first time and I looked into your eyes to realise what love is. ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB |
| 584:I wanted to join Footlights,” he says. “I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB |
| 585:At the beginning, you are 20 and you can just imagine... don't get me wrong, but having money. Then you realise that it's not only about you and what you are doing but that you have to give back. ~ Thierry Henry, #NFDB |
| 586:Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place. A city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB |
| 587:People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city. ~ Andy Goldsworthy, #NFDB |
| 588:When you have trained your mind and your nerves to realise this idea of the world's nondependence on you or on anybody, there will then be no reaction in the form of pain resulting from work. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 589:And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB |
| 590:Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realise your ideal of compassion. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB |
| 591:It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak. ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB |
| 592:No.’ I started pushing the trolley again. ‘If we quit now and later on realise that things could have got an awful lot worse, we’ll kick ourselves for giving up when things were going quite well. ~ Paul Mannering, #NFDB |
| 593:Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB |
| 594:After all, golf is only a game,'' said Millicent. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don't realise what they're saying. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB |
| 595:I also have that desire to blurt stuff out, but I've learned I can't do that. Not when you realise the whole world is listening. That's why perhaps I look so uncomfortable in interviews at times. ~ Kristen Stewart, #NFDB |
| 596:Never stop fighting until you arrive at your destined place - that is, the unique you. Have an aim in life, continuously acquire knowledge, work hard, and have perseverance to realise the great life. ~ Abdul Kalam, #NFDB |
| 597:Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB |
| 598:People are like that sometimes. They don't want to think about the consequences. And why should they? They're having fun. Sometimes they don't even realise somebody's in trouble until it's too late. ~ Beth Reekles, #NFDB |
| 599:was a deep sadness at the core of him, I could sense it. At least, I thought I could. Now I realise I was using him as a mirror – I thought I was looking at him, but I was gazing at my own reflection. ~ Jess Ryder, #NFDB |
| 600:What is it that makes us realise we’re going to die? What is it that happens on the day when we acknowledge it isn’t just a possibility, but an unavoidable fucking fact that our life will come to an end? ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB |
| 601:"After all, golf is only a game", said Millicent. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don't realise what they are saying. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB |
| 602:If suddenly the whole workers of the whole world disappear then the whole world will stop! Let us all realise this and let us celebrate the workers - these great people who make our world move! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 603:Man must spend much more time in extraordinary natural places to grasp much better how remarkable our planet is and to realise what a great privilege and what an enormous joy to be living here! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 604:Life is precious, and when someone dies it's an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn't. It really crushed him. ~ Val Kilmer, #NFDB |
| 605:Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martydom, fretting life away in fruitless worries though failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure ~ Seneca, #NFDB |
| 606:...when I see you here amidst all this, I realise that I proposed to a very small part of you. I thought I was giving you a home and a position, but here I see that I am taking you away from so much. ~ Daisy Goodwin, #NFDB |
| 607:You swore you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but now you realise He's not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And say, do you want to make a deal How does it feel ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB |
| 608:If you lose emotion, and you gain it back, you realise that hate and love are very important to distribute properly. So I'm not going to waste any kind of emotion on things that aren't related to me. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB |
| 609:It is always helpful to us to fix our attention on the God-ward aspect of Christian work; to realise that the work of God does not mean so much man's work for God, as God's own work through man. ~ James Hudson Taylor, #NFDB |
| 610:Those who stay calm on a rope-bridge will also realise that the rope-bridge too stays calm and lets the traveller to cross the other side easily! Universe helps to those who are tranquil and cool. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 611:One of the things that is devastating is I realise I haven't been living a different life than when I was, like, 12. I'm shocked at how reclusive I've been since then. I was unaware of it until recently. ~ Gus Van Sant, #NFDB |
| 612:She didn't realise it, for a long time, and it wasn't until they were having dinner one evening that he said something that she found funny and she looked at him and thought, Yes. I know you. I know you ~ Harriet Evans, #NFDB |
| 613:When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I'm older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all. ~ Michael Sheen, #NFDB |
| 614:It is only through my daughter that I have come to realise that a life without femininity – devoid of mystery, emotion, gentleness and the unerring power of a woman’s love – is no life at all. ~ Antonella Gambotto Burke, #NFDB |
| 615:No other technology company other than Apple has successfully transitioned their platform. It's almost never done, and it's way harder than you realise. This transition is where tech companies go to die. ~ Jim Balsillie, #NFDB |
| 616:I always think I love work, and I knew early on that I wanted to be an actress. Then I meet people who have truly dedicated their lives to acting, and I realise that Im so completely in the back seat. ~ Natascha McElhone, #NFDB |
| 617:Men are like chestnuts they sell in the street: they’re all hot and they all smell good when you buy them, but when you take them out of the paper cone you realise that most of them are rotten inside. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB |
| 618:Men are like chestnuts they sell in the street: they're all hot and they all smell good when you buy them, but when you take them out of the paper cone you realise that most of them are rotten inside. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon, #NFDB |
| 619:When you have been in TV and performing for as long as I have, you realise that you probably entertain in your sleep too... as for my catch phrase, I didn't actually say so much 'Can you see what it is yet? ~ Rolf Harris, #NFDB |
| 620:People don't realise what they had till it's gone. Like President Kennedy - nobody like him. Like The Beatles, there will never be anything like them. Like my man, Elvis Presley - I was the Elvis of boxing. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB |
| 621:Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 622:Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you're severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated, and fallible and human. ~ Vikki Wakefield, #NFDB |
| 623:I cannot think of what it was not to love him. To look at him and realise I had found what I had not known I was hungering for. A hunger so deep, so capable of driving me into the night, that it terrified me. ~ Hannah Kent, #NFDB |
| 624:If the egalitarian wishes to realise his ideal, given the unpromising nature of his material, he might consider rendering all persons equally dead, for perhaps only thus could he eradicate any difference. ~ D Michael Quinn, #NFDB |
625:We realise our existence is confined to our being. Our demise makes not a whit difference to the world around us, nor to the scheme of things.
We come to our senses; we understand our utter insignificance. ~ Umera Ahmed,#NFDB |
| 626:When you're young you want to show people what you can do, no matter what the cost. Whereas when you're older, and you realise that maybe a drum machine is better than you playing, then use the drum machine. ~ Phil Collins, #NFDB |
| 627:I'd love to adopt, but having a daughter, Daisy, who's in the middle of her teens, I'm now thinking: Is this a time to start all over again or is this a time to realise those child-rearing years are over? ~ Joely Richardson, #NFDB |
628:Many are the names of God and infinite are the forms through which He may be approached. In whatever name and form you worship Him, through them you will realise Him.
~ Sri Ramakrishna, Sayings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,#NFDB |
| 629:Sometimes in peacekeeping operations you show force in order not to use force - people realise that there's a pushback and there's a solid force there that's not going to be pushed around, that sometimes helps. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB |
| 630:The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB |
| 631:There comes a time when we realise that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow – that, in short, we are all going. ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 632:I like to think that we’re revolving on this planet and revolving through the galaxy. I love having context that’s so much bigger than I can fathom. It’s fantastic to realise how insignificant you are. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch, #NFDB |
| 633:I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB |
| 634:But why do adults, why do parents not realise that children desperately wish to do things not so much out of duty, but out of love? And you can’t force anything to love anything else against its nature. ~ David Clement Davies, #NFDB |
| 635:I've come to realise that the most precious commodity in life is not money, time, or even health as such, but mental energy. We should take great care in nurturing, protecting, and directing our mental energies. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB |
| 636:Once again, his mother had taken it upon herself to enter into negotiations without his consent. When would she realise that he was the head of the family now and not a child whom she could manipulate? Edwina ~ Karen Aminadra, #NFDB |
| 637:As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy. ~ Nursultan Nazarbayev, #NFDB |
| 638:Maybe it's just a humanising thing to realise that a ton of people in bands that make really exciting music, are just big nerds. And you know, maybe the Internet's done a lot in just exposing that long-held secret. ~ Chris Baio, #NFDB |
| 639:Our mind determines our actions. The more we fear failure, the greater the chances of failure. I realise my mistake. The repetitive statements about my intense dislike of hills have actually fuelled my negativity. ~ Parul Sheth, #NFDB |
| 640:The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB |
| 641:This great imperialistic world called the United States has made us believe that an Oscar is the most important thing in the world for an actor. But if you think about it for five minutes you realise it cant be. ~ Javier Bardem, #NFDB |
| 642:When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it's a source. They don't realise it is just one person typing out their opinion. ~ George Lucas, #NFDB |
| 643:Women if you want to realise yourselves - you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval - all your pet illusions must be unmasked - the lies of centuries have got to go - are you prepared for the Wrench? ~ Mina Loy, #NFDB |
| 644:Let's realise that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let's realise that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself o herself, and condemn us in return. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB |
| 645:Non-cooperation is an attempt to awaken the masses, to a sense of their dignity and power. This can only be done by enabling them to realise that they need not fear brute force, if they but know the soul within. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 646:The public wanted a fairy princess to come and touch them and everything would turn to gold. Little did they realise that the individual is crucifying herself inside because she didn't think she was good enough. ~ Princess Diana, #NFDB |
| 647:To me, the team is more important than any individual member of the squad, and the players have to realise that and accept that my priority is to pick a side with the best possible chance of winning each match. ~ Gerard Houllier, #NFDB |
| 648:you must realise from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
| 649:Man has infinite power within himself, and he can realise it - he can realise himself as the one infinite Self. It can be done; but you do not believe it. You pray to God and keep your powder dry all the time. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
650:My favourite bit of advice comes from Dr. Daniel Amen’s 18, 40, 60 Rule:
“At 18 you worry about what everyone thinks of you. At 40 you don’t care.
At 60 you realise no one was thinking about you anyway! ~ Daniel G Amen,#NFDB |
| 651:My mission was always intended to be slightly outside the public eye, because that makes me appear more interesting than I really am. A lot of people don’t realise that merely by staying away, you can create a myth. ~ Julian Cope, #NFDB |
| 652:The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light. ~ Katherine Mansfield, #NFDB |
| 653:To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean “to think”, but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one’s consciousness into it. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB |
| 654:While the Sun is setting, we realise that we have survived today as well and we thank to our mind, to our luck and to the universe! All these three made this miracle possible! Yes, staying alive is a miracle! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 655:Work done for the Self gives no bondage. Neither desire pleasure nor fear pain from work. It is the mind and body that work, not I. Tell yourself this unceasingly and realise it. Try not to know that you work. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 656:As I walk back to the school on my own, I realise I'm crying. So I go back to the stories I've read about the five and I try to make sense of their lives because in making sense of theirs, I may understand mine. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB |
| 657:I used to be the definition of a people pleaser. I would say 'yes' to anything and everything and then, when I got home, I'd complain and vent to my family. I had to realise that it's okay to say 'no' sometimes. ~ Lizzie Velasquez, #NFDB |
| 658:There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 659:There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 660:And of course she's sad about losing her leg, but she says it's made her realise how many things she hasn't lost...it's like a millionaire who loses a thousand dollars- he's sad, but he's still not that bad off. ~ Michael J Collins, #NFDB |
| 661:Deep inside his brain, something had made him realise that it was Malcolm (and now his friend too, who had been so stupid as to join with Malcolm in this whole stupid, stupid, stupid business), who stood in his way. ~ Michael Rosen, #NFDB |
| 662:I went through voice coaching. I was absolutely terrified. I thought my knees were going to buckle, and the first couple of takes I sounded like a pubescent boy. I didn't realise I was going to have to do it live. ~ Keira Knightley, #NFDB |
| 663:So you heroically undertook to endure the pains of faithlessness, just to be able to write good poems. But you didn´t realise then that when you lost that voice inside you, you´d end up all alone in an empty universe. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB |
| 664:I have to realise that as I am only English and am allowed to live in America, I have to give something in return. And since I cannot build a hospital, or endow a university, I can only give my infinite availability. ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB |
| 665:I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are. ~ Nora Ephron, #NFDB |
| 666:But we all waste opportunities,’ said Domenica. Every single one of us. Every young person does it. It’s because we think we have so much time, and then, when we realise that our time is finite, it’s too late. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 667:It was not the flesh we would have chosen, but I had long since given up dreams of resembling anyone from the movies and, with the pragmatism of the perfectly average, come to realise that this was me and that was fine. ~ Kate Griffin, #NFDB |
| 668:I've been around enough to realise that there are two things that once people have them, they don't want to give up, and it's extremely difficult to convince them to give up: one is privileges, and the other is subsidies. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB |
| 669:Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, the shorter it is. People lose their capacity to walk, run, travel, think, and experience life. I realise how important it is to use the time I have. ~ Viggo Mortensen, #NFDB |
670:Oh that's right
Keep away from me Please give me a push
Don't let me understand you Don't realise me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me you --- you --- me ~ Mina Loy,#NFDB |
| 671:Every seed wants to die in the soil! Every umbrella wants to live in a perpetually rainy world! Every mirror wants to see its own face in another mirror! Everything in this universe has dreams they wish to realise! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 672:It made her sad to realise that in spite of their so often having the same reactions, the same feelings, they never would reach the same conclusions, because their respective aims in life were almost diametrically opposed. ~ Paul Bowles, #NFDB |
| 673:I wonder if it's meant to be punishment for something one can't forgive oneself for. Or an external expression, Lady Queen, of an internal pain? Or perhaps it's a way to realise that you actually do want to stay alive. ~ Kristin Cashore, #NFDB |
| 674:We decided we'd have to do something pretty drastic to make people realise that I wasn't going to parade about in ra-ra skirts for the rest of the century. And I'm not going to parade about in black evening gowns on tour! ~ Clare Grogan, #NFDB |
| 675:When you watch the view, the view also watches you because you are also a view! If you can realise this, then you can also realise that there is no view, but only the viewer or there is no viewer, but only the view! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 676:I feel old and vulnerable. I now realise that I knew nothing and know nothing, but back when my career was beginning, I thought I was a man when, in fact, I was a dewy-eyed boy who'd not seen an avocado or eaten a tomato. ~ James Nesbitt, #NFDB |
| 677:I hope that people know me well enough and realise that I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper. I never have. I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of a guy. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB |
| 678:Indecision is the most unsexy thing on the planet. I don't know if I'm sexy but I think decisiveness is sexy. I also lose trust and faith in them when I realise I'm a bit on my own and that's a very disheartening feeling. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB |
| 679:I overheard her tell my mother that it didn't matter anyway, because we were entirely too young to understand a term like indecent exposure. She didn't realise that children file away such words, awaiting definition. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde, #NFDB |
| 680:I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that its merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense. ~ Elizabeth George, #NFDB |
| 681:The first period of getting famous was incredibly strange to me and really fun at the beginning because you didn't realise the consequences of anything. You could say or do whatever you wanted and it just didn't matter. ~ Robert Pattinson, #NFDB |
| 682:We (Muslims) have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realise that it was the negligence of the Muslims - and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam - that caused our present decay. ~ Muhammad Asad, #NFDB |
| 683:Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic. ~ B R Ambedkar, #NFDB |
| 684:I didn't worry about what DeNiro thought... I went in, looked him in the eye, and got the part. I was confident, even though I'd never done anything like it before. Now I realise it was ignorant confidence-I had no idea. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio, #NFDB |
| 685:In that dark hour I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died. I suddenly knew I had no desire or tenderness or esteem. Nothing remained except the chill bonds of law and duty an custom. ~ Evelyn Waugh, #NFDB |
| 686:Mum turns back to face the screen, and I realise I’m still nodding. Anxiety Girl in action. She has the power to nod until she makes the connection she so desperately needs, or until her head falls off, whichever comes first. ~ Kirsty Eagar, #NFDB |
| 687:Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back. ~ Nadine Gordimer, #NFDB |
| 688:When you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows - literally unforgettable because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition. ~ Charles Saatchi, #NFDB |
| 689:It’s difficult to know which second among a lifetime of seconds is more special. Often when you realise how precious those seconds are, it’s too late for them to be captured because the moment has passed. We realise too late. ~ Cecelia Ahern, #NFDB |
| 690:Theres different kinds of love, and Id never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love Ive experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that theres this other love out there. ~ Tracey Emin, #NFDB |
| 691:Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB |
| 692:I realise how important it is to use the time I have. I respect people who want to do that by watching television. I happen to want to read books. But I know I can't read all the books or watch all the movies in one lifetime. ~ Viggo Mortensen, #NFDB |
| 693:It's like your whole life you 've been falling toward the earth, until the moment someone catches you. And you realise that somehow you 've caught her at the same time. And together, instead of falling, you might be able to fly. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB |
| 694:See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB |
| 695:You don't see it coming. They manipulate you, they smother you with love and affection, making out you're the only thing that matters in their lives, and by the time you realise who they really are, it's too late. They have you. ~ Mel Sherratt, #NFDB |
| 696:Food is one of life's really great pleasures. My 20th birthday party was all about booze, my 30th birthday was about drugs, and now I realise that my 40s are about food. It's something you appreciate more and more as you get older. ~ Alex James, #NFDB |
| 697:I’ll tell you something, something important. Write this down. You ready?’ ‘Yes, yes, I’m ready.’ ‘Love is a decision.’ ‘Love is a decision?’ ‘That’s right. A decision. Not a feeling. That’s what you young people don’t realise. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB |
| 698:I think your girlfriends getting Jealous," Luce said, gesturing at the pair. "Which one?" He asked. "I didn't realise they were both your girlfriends." "Neither is my girlfriend. I meant, which one did you think was my girlfriend? ~ Lauren Kate, #NFDB |
| 699:When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life. 13 Jan 1951 ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #NFDB |
| 700:You start to feel panic, because you realise that human beings are possessed by the idea that they must fill the world with objects and ideas that will outlive them, and you suddenly glimpse the fires that burn below human despair. ~ Greg Baxter, #NFDB |
| 701:I think it is not only important that people go to the Anne Frank House to see the secret annex, but also that they are helped to realise that people are also persecuted today because of their race, religion or political convictions. ~ Otto Frank, #NFDB |
| 702:Let us lose none of their humble words, let us note their slightest gestures, and tell me, tell me that we will think of them together, now and later, when we realise the misery of the times and the magnitude of their sacrifice. ~ Georges Duhamel, #NFDB |
| 703:You spend a long time waiting for life to start – her past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant – and then it does start and you realise it isn’t what you’d expected, or asked for. ~ Megan Abbott, #NFDB |
| 704:It's not enough to have good thoughts for the world. You must get out there! It is also really important that each person realise their own worth. If you don't think you're good enough, how can you turn around and help save the world? ~ Ted Danson, #NFDB |
705:Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within,
A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
To realise its own supernal Light,
Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#NFDB |
| 706:It is essential to realise, that, while we make efforts to live the Christian life today, the world which have formed in our spoiled times, demands soul, both in the everyday life and in the religion, and can be called totalitarian. ~ Seraphim Rose, #NFDB |
| 707:No one seems to realise that the aristocracy is God’s special gift to mankind. The burghers treat us no better than commoners. Considering our divine origins, such disrespect is the worst form of impiety. I’m sure your Grace agrees. ~ David Eddings, #NFDB |
| 708:Having visited Oxfam-funded school programs in rural communities has made me realise how vital education is to developing countries in bringing people out of poverty and giving them a sense of dignity, self-worth and confidence. ~ Scarlett Johansson, #NFDB |
| 709:Whatever is needed for you and your body will be taken care of, when you know this the lack will disappear from your life. When you realise ISHA permeates your everything you relax and are at ease - that is when things happen. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB |
| 710:It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 711:It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 712:Oh yes, We've all danced to this particular tune at one time in our lives. In my experience, the majority of women are hopeless romantics, believing that, in time, he'll realise how wonderful we are, and fall in love with us.... ~ Catherine Sanderson, #NFDB |
| 713:Pre-analytic vision. Worldview. Paradigm. Frame. These are cousin concepts. What matters more than the one you choose to use is to realise that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it. ~ Kate Raworth, #NFDB |
714:We dig holes for ourselves, of comfortable living, and it’s hard to see just how deep down you are until you suddenly want to take a look at the world up there, some fresh air
and realise you can’t get up. You’re too far down. ~ Charlotte Eriksson,#NFDB |
| 715:I used to draw stickmen with star glasses when I was at school. I didn't realise that would end up being me! The whole idea was that the glasses had mirrors, and if a youngster looked at me, they'd see themselves. Everybody is a star. ~ Bootsy Collins, #NFDB |
| 716:To be ourselves liberated from ego and realise our true selves is the first necessity; all else can be achieved as a luminous result, a necessary consequence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #NFDB |
| 717:It's a risky business being a cyclist in the UK, there are a lot of people who really dislike us. It's the Jeremy Clarkson influence - we're hated on the roads. We just hope people realise we are just flesh and bones on two wheels. ~ Victoria Pendleton, #NFDB |
| 718:My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realise I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years. ~ Helene Hanff, #NFDB |
| 719:This room is the strangest thing Melanie has ever seen. Of course, she’s starting to realise that she hasn’t seen all that much, but there are more things here of more baffling variety than she would have thought the whole world could hold. ~ M R Carey, #NFDB |
| 720:I absolutely loathe and hate the work... But I love youth. I realise how lucky it is being with youth, and what an honour that is. Nowhere else could a fat 47-year-old speak to people as young as this. They'd think you were a paedophile. ~ Louise Wilson, #NFDB |
721:I think your girlfriends getting Jealous," Luce said, gesturing at the pair.
"Which one?" He asked.
"I didn't realise they were both your girlfriends."
"Neither is my girlfriend. I meant, which one did you think was my girlfriend? ~ Lauren Kate,#NFDB |
| 722:It was a fact, he was only now beginning to realise, that the conversation of the drunk is only interesting to the drunk. A few glasses of wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB |
| 723:As soon as we fall in love and we realise we've met the one the rest of our lives can't come soon enough. It's not like you're in a rush to get to the finish line, you're in a rush to feel and experience everything and then do it all again. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB |
| 724:In the process of trying to understand others' difficult behaviour, I've found it is very helpful to realise that no one chooses to be unhappy. If someone is unhappy, they will be so because they genuinely cannot see how to do otherwise. ~ Torey L Hayden, #NFDB |
| 725:Come Zvezda,” he urges. “It’s time.” “What if I say I don’t want to?” His hand wavers, but he doesn’t retreat. “Then it would break my heart.” “I didn’t realise that you had a heart to break,” I whisper. “Even monsters have hearts, my sweet. ~ A Zavarelli, #NFDB |
726:Earnshaw is quite a famous name, thanks to Miss Brontë . I did not realise there were Earnshaws in this country."
Mrs. Earnshaw gave a sharp nod. "Aye. And Heathcliffs and Eyres, as well. Proper little thieves, those Brontë girls. ~ Deanna Raybourn,#NFDB |
| 727:Spanking outdoors has the double pleasure of doing something illicit and doing it in a place where you might be seen. In every woman, I came to realise, there is a desire to be naked, a desire to be seen naked and the desire to be spanked. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB |
| 728:Because society places a value on masculinity, gay men aspire to it. If you go to a gay club and the doorman says, 'You do realise this is a gay club, don't you lads?' you get all excited because you think, 'Wow, he thought I was straight!' ~ Graham Norton, #NFDB |
| 729:Before getting meningitis, I was such a hypochondriac, worrying about the slightest ache. Ironically, I overlooked meningitis because the symptoms seemed like flu. I guess you don't realise how healthy you are until it is taken away from you. ~ Petra Stunt, #NFDB |
| 730:There's a scary moment when you realise you're no longer the youngest person in the room. Especially if you've been a successful young person. That's followed, of course, by the realisation that you're actually the oldest person in the room. ~ Helen Mirren, #NFDB |
| 731:We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB |
| 732:What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB |
| 733:Women aren't so keen to have them anymore, not where I come from, anyway. They've got other fish to fry, which is fair enough. But they don't realise, sometimes, what they're missing, or what they're withholding, you know? The power they have. ~ Tim Winton, #NFDB |
| 734:Nobody's really happy. And as soon as society realises that you can't trust anyone and that hardship is a natural part of existence, the sooner the therapists will realise that they are worthless! Sorry. They have worth deficit disorder! ~ Christopher Titus, #NFDB |
| 735:Our beliefs are like the boundaries of our mind, which protect us from external manipulations like tall boundary walls protect us from external aggression. Little do we realise that all forms of beliefs gradually become a prison to our mind. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB |
| 736:The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realise in some subtle way that you realise their importance, and recognise it sincerely. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB |
| 737:Any man who wants to master the essence of my strategy must research diligently, training morning and evening. Thus can he polish his skill, become free from self, and realise extraordinary ability. He will come to possess miraculous power. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB |
| 738:Lord responds to all and works for all. Just as He sent rain at my plea, so He fulfills any sincere desire of the devotee. Seldom do men realise how often God heeds their prayers. He is not partial to a few, but listens to everyone who ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB |
| 739:That’s the problem with parenthood. Half of it is spent waiting it out till it’s done and you can go back to the people you were before, but you don’t realise that the older your kids get the older you’re getting. Those before people have gone. ~ Jenny Oliver, #NFDB |
| 740:You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB |
741:Did you know that in the Lion King, the hyenas – the bad guys – all speak in either black or Latino slang? And that the little cubs are told not to go where the hyenas live?"
"Do you realise that scar, the villain, is darker than Mufasa? ~ Jodi Picoult,#NFDB |
| 742:I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: 'Oh my God, what a blessing.' Then you realise it's important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 743:The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism. We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. ~ Antony Beevor, #NFDB |
744:The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
So as a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior. ~ Steve Biko,#NFDB |
| 745:I don't have a BlackBerry or whatever you call it. And there is something to be said for being isolated and out of phone range, because you can fall into a habit to such a degree that you don't even realise that you've lost something: silence. ~ Viggo Mortensen, #NFDB |
| 746:I get up to 400 letters a week, so I have a full-time PA, but I try to answer everything. People don't seem to realise that if they send something living in the post it's going to die on the way. Especially when you wrap it in a polythene bag. ~ Alan Titchmarsh, #NFDB |
| 747:To ignore death and to be afraid of it is dumb because everyone is going to face it at some point. If you look at death and the reality of it, you realise that we're all going to die, so let's use this time on Earth to be positive and do good things. ~ Ray Toro, #NFDB |
| 748:Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale -- a daydream." "Which I can and will realise. I shall begin today. ~ Charlotte Bronte, #NFDB |
| 749:I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story. ~ John McGahern, #NFDB |
| 750:We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB |
| 751:To be honest I think my read is people are now taking this seriously. They realise that the game is up and the planet and all of us - I mean all of us - have to really start doing something much more drastic in order to try and contain the impacts. ~ Chris Barrie, #NFDB |
752:Antigone
Don't you realise that you're talking to a dead woman alive?
Chorus
It's because you run yourself out in a grief with no cure , no time limit, no measure. It is a knot no one can untie. Why are you so in love with things unbearable? ~ Slavoj i ek,#NFDB |
753:Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale -- a daydream."
"Which I can and will realise. I shall begin today. ~ Charlotte Bront,#NFDB |
| 754:I know you might not want to hear it, dear,’ Rose said gently, ‘but your first lesson, before you do anything else, is to realise that there is nothing wrong with you. To see that you’re absolutely perfect, exactly as you are. This is compassion. ~ Menna van Praag, #NFDB |
| 755:Realise that this mis-statement should be corrected at once, but omit to do so, and later find myself involved in entirely unintentional web of falsehood. Should like to work out how far morally to blame for this state of things, but have not time. ~ E M Delafield, #NFDB |
756:Roland was brave an romantic, and his speech imploring Lucinda to flee with him had filled Bronwyn's eyes with tears. "I wish I knew a Roland."
During her unpleasant season, she'd come to realise that the world was woefully short of Rolands. ~ Karen Hawkins,#NFDB |
| 757:I don't think we really measured the enormity of the whole occasion. I'm very, very surprised. We never expected it. When I set out in May we didn't realise how big this was. Only now have we realised the importance of this. [on the 2005 Ashes win ~ Duncan Fletcher, #NFDB |
| 758:It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB |
| 759:Everything happens for a reason, and everything has a story, and if you take time to realise what your dream is and what you really want in life... whether it's sports, whether it's in other fields, you have to realise that there's always work to do. ~ Stephen Curry, #NFDB |
| 760:For a long time, I used to think that I had a man's brain that I thought more like a man than a woman. But now I've come to realise that whatever it is I do think like, it's not like men; because men don't really think like men, they think like boys. ~ David Baddiel, #NFDB |
| 761:Foyles War made me realise that Churchill actually had questionable morals; his decisions meant that good people died. It must have weighed heavily on his soul, but he never let his personal demons get in the way of what was best for our country. ~ Honeysuckle Weeks, #NFDB |
| 762:God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
| 763:It had all dropped into place, like the last bit of the jigsaw, which you thought all along was a bit of left-hand sky, but when you turn it over you realise it's the last chunk of right-hand sea, or the sky tricksily reflected in the surface of the pond. ~ Tom Holt, #NFDB |
| 764:One of my earliest memories was me singing 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin' at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn't even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed. ~ James Taylor, #NFDB |
765:This one is OK,' I say quietly.
‘OK, OK, OK. Everything is always just ‘OK’. It’s so boring. Who wants to be ‘OK’?
I sit for a moment and think about what she said. It doesn’t take me long to realise that I, quite genuinely, just want to be OK. ~ Dawn O Porter,#NFDB |
| 766:I used to look at older people who bothered to still attend nightclubs and couldn't help but wonder why. Didn't they realise how foolish they looked? Of course, now that I'm one of those people myself, I have decided that such rules don't apply to me. ~ Jarvis Cocker, #NFDB |
| 767:All man must live in Machu Picchu for some time! Over there, you will be closer to the universe and you will realise how trivial you are in this chaotic cosmos. Science is the only power which will make you bigger and significant in this universe! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 768:I never travel without my Stetson, but the more I wear it the more I realise that no one wears hats any more. When I was a kid everybody wore hats, especially in Texas, but I get off the plane in Dallas now and I'm the only guy with a hat. It's amazing. ~ Larry Hagman, #NFDB |
| 769:I realise it must be strange for you, being here in England. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I’ve heard a lot of this before. ~ Hugh Laurie, #NFDB |
| 770:Marcus Aurelius, AD 121-180, author of Meditations. Quoth said emperor: It is not death a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. And also: You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength. ~ Claire North, #NFDB |
| 771:Perhaps that is the real surprise of love; it exists, but one may not attribute causes and effects to it. The existence may appear to be a mere fallacy to the minds of some, and by the time they realise what hit them, they would already be down and dead. ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB |
| 772:You've got to find forgiveness, Elsie said; I just didn't realise she meant I had to find it for myself. Perhaps that's the most important moment. Not the moment of the mistake itself, but the moment in which you finally forgive yourself for making it. ~ Joanna Cannon, #NFDB |
| 773:It is tragic that so few young people in Western democracies vote. They have forgotten that their ancestors fought for the right to choose and change their leaders. They don't realise that their votes are more important than their tweets or Facebook posts. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB |
| 774:Seriously. All those times I said I hated you? I didn’t. I realise that now. That hate was nothing. It was a microscopic semen stain on the hotel mattress of life. But this hate I feel now is so much more. It’s bukkake-level compared to what came before. ~ Paul Crilley, #NFDB |
| 775:The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB |
| 776:We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 777:We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 778:I'm really a pussycat and this [bad-boy] image has been totally overblown for 30 years. Sure, I used to rumble a little but I don't do that stuff anymore. I'm an old man now. When you reach your 50s, you realise that if you don't mellow, you won't last. ~ George C Scott, #NFDB |
| 779:There's a thing I think children realise at a certain age, which is that if their parents say, 'Don't do it', and they go ahead and do it, they're still not going to die. And I think that's what it is: that no matter what you do, you're not going to die. ~ Rupert Graves, #NFDB |
| 780:As much as I want to pull away, I just can't do it. Cal is a cliff, and I throw myself over the edge, not bothering to think of what it could do to us both. One day he'll realise that I am his enemy, and all this will be a far-gone memory. But not yet. ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB |
781:It's only because I've lived with brothers that I realise, after a moment, that he's not looking outside but rather inside, wrestling with something inside himself. And there's nothing for it but to wait.
Finally, he asks, "Do you want to ride him? ~ Maggie Stiefvater,#NFDB |
| 782:When one is young, aspiring to play for the country, doing well, any hindrance, like injury or being out of form, can be frustrating and a cause of annoyance or even anger. But once you have a close encounter with death, you realise the real value of life. ~ Yuvraj Singh, #NFDB |
| 783:And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB |
| 784:Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 785:Holden found one helpless little hand that closed feebly on his finger. And the clutch ran through his body till it settled about his heart. Till then his sole thought had been for Ameera. He began to realise that there was some one else in the world,... ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB |
| 786:Many of us realise that what we call ‘spirituality’ has limitations: it can be about seeking, doing, questing. This can become exhausting and run out of energy. Many of us seek but do not find, and why? Because to find we have to allow ourselves to be found. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB |
| 787:My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. “The longer I do my job,” he said, “the more I realise that humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel. ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 788:There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear. ~ James Balog, #NFDB |
| 789:Damn, he was bored. It was a fact, he was only now beginning to realise, that the conversation of the drunk is only interesting to the drunk. A few glasses on wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB |
| 790:If intelligent beings are going to get along together without too much friction, it’s important to realise that other members of your species have an internal mental universe, which controls their actions in the same way that your own mind controls yours. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB |
| 791:It forced me to realise that I'd been blaming you for not being flawless. And none of us is flawless.' Another sigh. 'I was so angry with myself for what happened to Michael and Lucy that I had to turn my anger somewhere else and you were the easiest target. ~ Val McDermid, #NFDB |
| 792:This is weft and the weave of story for me. The endless lyrical emerging of the earth’s tremendous thinking and the humbling required to simply bear witness to it. And the extraordinary day, when for an hour or so you realise that you too are being witnessed. ~ Martin Shaw, #NFDB |
| 793:Dad. I was so busy focusing on all the negativity that I didn’t see what I had, or what I could have had. I spent most of my life analysing where I’d gone wrong rather than where I was. You don’t realise how much you have until it’s all taken away from you. ~ Keith A Pearson, #NFDB |
| 794:I realise that every time my face is on TV or I'm playing in a tournament, that I am a role model for a lot of people and a lot of kids do look up to me. I try to do my best in that regard and put myself across as honestly and as modestly as possible, as well. ~ Rory McIlroy, #NFDB |
| 795:I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel. ~ Sara Baume, #NFDB |
| 796:These days, when I see friends, lovers and partners of sad, lost young men doing it anyway, and I want to shake them hard by the shoulders and shout that you can’t save them. At least not like that. Life gets a lot simpler when you realise you can’t save them. ~ Laurie Penny, #NFDB |
| 797:The very first big photo shoot I ever did was with Bruce Weber. I couldn't believe this guy was taking my picture, so when he told me to get in the bathtub, I just did. It's only now, looking back, that I realise, you don't have to do everything people tell you. ~ Matt Damon, #NFDB |
| 798:youth wasn't like the skin of a snake that you sloughed off and never saw again but rather a feeling that you tuck away because you think you don't need it any more and it's only when you come across it by accident that you realise just how much fun it really is ~ Mike Gayle, #NFDB |
| 799:Although [in 1937] we might still hope to prevent the divisions of Europe into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps, our real affinities and interests, strategic as well as political, lay with France, a fact which some of my colleagues were most reluctant to realise. ~ Anthony Eden, #NFDB |
| 800:Every relationship has problems but when those problems arise you have to realise that they don't mean your relationship is broken, it's just a little bent. Bent things can be fixed and like so your relationship can too. The first step however is realising that. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB |
801:i reduced my body to aesthetics
forgot the work it did to keep me alive
with every beat and breath
declared it a grand failure for not looking like theirs
searched everywhere for a miracle
foolish enough to not realise
i was already living in one ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB |
| 802:Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB |
| 803:People were like, "Oh maybe we can change your teeth" and I thought that was going a bit far. You have to be really strong in this job and realise that you are your own boss and if someone tells you to do something, you don't have to do it. I really like my teeth. ~ Lara Stone, #NFDB |
| 804:When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives. ~ Abdul Kalam, #NFDB |
| 805:You know,' she begins, 'you fellas ought to be looking after each other.' Her comment makes me realise that through the lies, the greatest irony is that we are looking out for each other. It's just that in the end, we're letting her down. That's what injures us. ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB |
| 806:All along, you've been shaping your destiny unconsciously. But you can also work on it consciously. If you make the effort to access your core and realise that everything is your responsibility, and shift your focus inside you, then you can rewrite your destiny. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB |
| 807:In the beginning, everybody that gets to work with me, thinks Im nice. But three weeks later, they hear a bell ringing. Then they realise I meant everything I said during that first week. Its not my fault people are not taking me serious from the first moment. ~ Andrew Eldritch, #NFDB |
| 808:It was enough to see her face light up when we heard the sounds that told us my brother was come home, or to catch the sudden tenderness that came into is eyes when he looked at he, to realise the depth of the love that had grown between those two strange hearts. ~ Ahdaf Soueif, #NFDB |
| 809:Obviously, the intention was not to go back to images traditionally valued as worthy or holy images and shapes, but exactly the opposite; its main purpose had to be, to realise as sacred art anything which so far had been regarded as of little value and pitiful. ~ Antoni Tapies, #NFDB |
| 810:There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at. ~ Marc Jacobs, #NFDB |
| 811:Bringing an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may help the young Arab generation to realise their aspirations. Israel is more than willing to offer our experience in building a modern economy in spite of limited resources to the whole region. ~ Shimon Peres, #NFDB |
| 812:...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 813:Lady with fair countenance! Understand that one who is not able to realise the Truth in his Heart by this knowledge of spiritual wisdom known as Kala Jnana, can never attain it even by studying countless crores ofsastras (scriptures) spread out like the sky. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 814:Stuff just comes out all the time, sometimes when I sing live it really comes alive and I sort of... I write songs and then almost... not forget about it, but live it really comes out and I suddenly realise what I've written. I don't know where it all comes from. ~ Ellie Goulding, #NFDB |
| 815:When I think about my MVP season, I will also think about the loss to Golden State. But winning the award as Most Valuable Player of the NBA is just a huge honour. I didn't really realise how big it was until Mark Cuban had tears in his eyes at the award ceremony. ~ Dirk Nowitzki, #NFDB |
| 816:I don't mean to be overly sensitive or anything like that, but you just have to take a minute in every day, and just reflect on where you are, and just realise what you've got, because you just never know where the next huge change in your life is going to come from. ~ Corey Taylor, #NFDB |
| 817:When I was young, I wanted to find the Great Dark Man. When I said that I realise now that people thought that by 'dark' I meant black, and that by 'great' I meant big. Whereas I only meant a strong, mysterious person; someone who would 'take me away from all this.' ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB |
| 818:The more we consider these mid-Victorians,’ wrote Munby’s biographer Derek Hudson, ‘the more we realise how many, including some of the most sensitively intelligent, were forced by the pressures of a materialist age to live out a world of fantasy in their daily lives.’1 ~ A N Wilson, #NFDB |
| 819:What you've got to realise is that footballers, and me in particular, have seen everything in the changing room. Everything. I've seen the manager kicking off with the players, the players kicking off with him, players fighting each other, managers fighting, everything. ~ Ryan Giggs, #NFDB |
| 820:When I first met him on a photo shoot, I was dazzled by his long legs, slender, toned body, and those full lips that looked like they could rival a hoover for sucking potential. I completely failed to realise therefore that Dean’s workable brain cells are quite lonely. ~ Lily Morton, #NFDB |
| 821:He had only spoken up because he felt that it would have been wrong not to do so. He did not realise that this willingness to step forward and take responsibility was precisely what defined a leader. Had this occured to him earlier he may well have held his tongue. ~ Peter A Flannery, #NFDB |
| 822:If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB |
| 823:I realise that I do not change the course of history. I am an actor, I do a movie, that's the end of it. You have to realise we are just clowns for hire. After I had success it was great, at first, not to worry about money. It was on my mind when I was growing up. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio, #NFDB |
| 824:Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own. ~ Niall Williams, #NFDB |
| 825:she’ll come to realise quickly that the fucked up ones gravitate towards each other like magnets. Darkness doesn’t seek out the light. It smothers the light, and it revels in the light’s death. And there is nothing more dangerous than darkness that doesn’t have an outlet. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 826:Sometimes you have to realise that somebody is not coming back and there will be no happy ending. You don't get the prince, you get the frog. And sometimes after a while the frog doesn't seem so bad and you realise that the prince was not in fact that much of a prince. ~ Hazel Osmond, #NFDB |
| 827:The moment you realise and feel sad that the world does not hear and see you when you are in a small village, your marvellous journey starts towards the universal infinity! If you can be universal, everyone sees you, everyone hears you! Leave your local position! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
828:It is not in order to be happy that we are upon earth, for in the present conditions of terrestrial life happiness is an impossibility. We are upon earth to find and realise the Divine, for the Divine Consciousness alone can give true happiness.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB |
| 829:Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and selfdeceptions. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 830:Partly James was jealous because he was a virgin, but mostly it just felt really weird being in a room with two people who'd spent the night having sex. It reminded him of the feeling you get when you pull a hair off your tongue and realise it's not one of your own. ~ Robert Muchamore, #NFDB |
831:You plant a seed thinking it's love. It's only when the thing starts putting down roots that you realise it's not growing the way it should. But by then it's too late. It has sprouted foliage, blossomed and borne demented fruit.
What do you do with the sickness in you? ~ Liz Jensen,#NFDB |
| 832:he could not bear that a woman, and his wife at that, should not bow before him — this would have degraded him. He then began to realise that henceforth his wife would never yield to him in any matter, and that an obstinate strife for predominance must start between them. ~ Maxim Gorky, #NFDB |
| 833:Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity. ~ Buchi Emecheta, #NFDB |
| 834:Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer. ~ Sofia Samatar, #NFDB |
| 835:We must not be bewildered by appearances. Sri Aurobindo has not left us. Sri Aurobindo is here, as living and as present as ever and it is left to us to realise his work with all the sincerity, eagerness and concentration necessary. 15 December 1950 ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother I, #NFDB |
| 836:I believe that the 21st century economy is an economy of people, not of factories. The intellectual factor has become increasingly important in the economy, which is why we are planning to focus on providing additional opportunities for people to realise their potential. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB |
| 837:I think as a child you know when it's time for your parents to split. You realise they love each other, but they're not in love with each other. And I think as a child it's much better for your parents to split than for them to stay and have dysfunction within the family. ~ Abbie Cornish, #NFDB |
| 838:Love is something that strikes without warning to the most unsuspecting. It’s a fucking gift and so goddamn priceless, but only the worthy realise what they have. Only the ones truly deserving fight every fucking day to treasure it. And those who don’t…they end up alone. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB |
| 839:You've just got to get over that mental hurdle and those battles in your own head during matches when things aren't going so well. It takes time. It's probably all things I already knew, but for someone to talk about it maybe in a different way makes you realise things. ~ Samantha Stosur, #NFDB |
| 840:Lots of kids when they get their first instrument hammer away at it but they don't realise there are so many levels of dynamics with a guitar. You can play one note on a guitar and it really gets to people if it is the right note in the right place played by the right person. ~ Gary Moore, #NFDB |
| 841:My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them. ~ Ma Jian, #NFDB |
| 842:My plans for today are to hang about hoping for a glimpse of her, to have my heart eaten away by the thought of her; to feel my blood bounding maddeningly, ridiculously, like a young boy's; to despair; to realise the weight of my misery and hunger with each step I take. ~ Elizabeth Taylor, #NFDB |
| 843:It's an amazing feeling to know that life is actually growing inside your body. The first time you see the ultrasound and you see the little bones and you realise that it's part of you and it's in your care is life changing and this sort of protective instinct has taken over. ~ Halle Berry, #NFDB |
| 844:I'm not stupid, I realise selling it is not as important as it used to be that way, I think it's more important to get your music out there and if people want to hear it an mp3 form or whatever I'm fine with that, I just don't enjoy the sound of it at home for personal taste. ~ Butch Walker, #NFDB |
845:We're quiet for a moment. And then: 'Why did you call me Matt?'
'It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now that I know you, I realise I should have called that character Dick.'
He laughs, and then the couch shakes. 'Honestly, Gabe, I forgot you could be this much fun. ~ Paula Weston,#NFDB |
| 846:There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. ~ Beatrice Warde, #NFDB |
| 847:Again there was silence. It was broken by the high trill of the telephone-bell. "There is one of our bacilli squeaking for help," said he with a grim smile. "They are beginning to realise that their continued existence is not really one of the necessities of the universe. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB |
| 848:As you get older no doubt you'll change automatically, just like I did. You will learn all the tricks. You will dress much better, and talk much more, and listen much less. And you'll start to realise that it never does one much good to take anything too seriously at all. ~ Caroline Blackwood, #NFDB |
| 849:If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
| 850:Italy have plenty of high-quality players. Newcomers need time to get adjusted to the set-up and the system of play. I'm very young, and although I think I have shown good quality in my international games, I realise that there are plenty of others competing for places. ~ Alessandro Del Piero, #NFDB |
| 851:In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall - that when the play is finished, it's done - but now I realise it's more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living. ~ Lee Hall, #NFDB |
| 852:People are still disturbingly vague about the treatment of animals. People still seem to believe that meat is a particular substance not at all connected to animals playing in the field over there. People don't realise how gruesomely and fighteningly the animal gets to the plate... ~ Morrissey, #NFDB |
| 853:When my parents were growing up the world's population was under three billion. During my children's lifetime, it is likely to exceed nine billion. You don't need to be an expert to realise that sustainable development is going to become the greatest challenge we face this century ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB |
| 854:By nature, I'm a very positive person, and because I'm happy in myself, and in my life, and I've got a great husband, and beautiful children, and I have a job that I love that calls for a certain amount of emotional expression, I get to realise a lot of my dreams and aspirations. ~ Kate Winslet, #NFDB |
| 855:My dad says that when I was two or three I used to go out dressed as a different character every day. I remember thinking it was perfectly normal to wear different coloured shoes and carry a pink umbrella. But now I've got a goddaughter of that age; I realise it's not normal at all. ~ Alice Eve, #NFDB |
| 856:The more experience I get, the more I know to relax and let go of things because there's so much that is out of your control. So much needs to happen to get a film made nowadays and star power doesn't even matter anymore. So, me being what I am, I have to realise that to an extent. ~ Fran Kranz, #NFDB |
| 857:By handling each sentimental item and deciding what to discard, you process your past. If you just stow these things away in a drawer or cardboard box, before you realise it, your past will become a weight that holds you back and keeps you from living in the here and now. Pg.116-117 ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB |
858:She was terrified. She was beginning to realise that after long months of selfcontrol,
the pressure, the
earthquake, the volcano of her soul was showing signs that it was about to erupt, and the
moment that this happened, she would have no way of controlling her feelings. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB |
| 859:Thank you very much, Miss Badger," she said. "I appreciate your honesty. I realise this may have put you in a difficult position here, but I trust you will not have any trouble." Marcia glared at Jillie Djinn. "However, if you do, there is always a place for you at the Wizard Tower. ~ Angie Sage, #NFDB |
| 860:[The original development of the Spinning Mule was a] continual endeavour to realise a more perfect principle of spinning; and though often baffled, I as often renewed the attempt, and at length succeeded to my utmost desire, at the expense of every shilling I had in the world. ~ Samuel Crompton, #NFDB |
| 861:Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, ‘that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?’ And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB |
862:He grinned. “You realise I’m reporting for duty on the second of January?”
“Good. Then the last memory you’ll have of me is wearing a party frock and knocking back cocktails while I kick old 1914 right in the teeth. Let’s send it off in style.
(Delilah and Johnny) ~ Deanna Raybourn,#NFDB |
| 863:I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition. ~ Eve Arnold, #NFDB |
| 864:I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB |
| 865:I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart. ~ Ben Affleck, #NFDB |
866:Realise this: one day your soul
will depart from your body and you will
be drawn behind the curtain that floats between us
and the unknown. While you wait for that moment, be happy,
because you don't know where you came from and
you don't know where you will be going. ~ Omar Khayy m,#NFDB |
| 867:Do you realise that when you give a schilling to a beggar you are giving it to yourself?Do you realise that when you help a dog over a stile you yourself are being helped?Do you realise when you kick a man when he is down, you are kicking yourslef?Give him another kick, you deserve it! ~ Wei Wu Wei, #NFDB |
| 868:I think you can realise that a lot of people in bands - well - I guess you kinda wanna... There's a lot less mystique in playing in a rock band today, than in the 60's or 70's. I don't think there's any bands that I can think of, that have this rock god myth that like Led Zeppelin had. ~ Chris Baio, #NFDB |
| 869:I've also grown as an actor as I've got older in life. I've learnt how to go to work, immerse myself 100 per cent in the character and, at the end of the day, take it all off and go back, get a nice bubble bath, have a nice massage and realise that is not my life. And that feels good. ~ Halle Berry, #NFDB |
| 870:I was shocked by the reaction I got for Bleak House. It was very intensive but one of the best jobs of my life. It was a chance to play a character that grows and develops and I was very enmeshed in it. But I didn't realise how stylish it was and how much people would love it. ~ Anna Maxwell Martin, #NFDB |
| 871:Love, for her, was something to be gloried in and acknowledged; like so many others, she had not seen enough of the War at first hand to realise how quickly romance was being replaced by bitterness and pessimism in all the young lovers whom 1914 had caught at the end of their teens. ~ Vera Brittain, #NFDB |
| 872:That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realise that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow were all right. We go on ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB |
| 873:When you realise that money doesn't actually make you happy, it's a quick fix to have things you've always wanted, but then when you have it, you realise that's not what actually makes you happy. It's more about having a great marriage and happy children; that's what life's all about. ~ Shane Filan, #NFDB |
| 874:Love is something that strikes without warning to the most unsuspecting. It’s a fucking gift and so goddamn priceless, but only the worthy realise what they have. Only the ones truly deserving fight every fucking day to treasure it. And those who don’t...they end up alone.” Dropping ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB |
| 875:Malander had an idea and was trying to work it out, but it would take him time. Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again. Or else they forgot their idea along the way and didn't even realise that they forgotten. ~ Tove Jansson, #NFDB |
| 876:Stop wearing that mask that is trying to be a match for everybody, and realise that you have to have more of a 1s and 10s model. A 1s and 10s model means that if you want to be a 10 for somebody you have to risk being a 1 for somebody else. [...] You wanna express who you really are. ~ Steve Pavlina, #NFDB |
| 877:There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one. ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB |
| 878:This is a terribly dangerous journey" said Bjorn, "and few would have the courage to make it except you and me". His wife said, "if you let Kari down, you had better realise that you will never be allowed into my bed again, and that my kinsmen will force a division of property between us ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 879:You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that. ~ Damian Barr, #NFDB |
880:I wish the choice I have to make today was so simple. I realise I have the choice to believe in two terrible things. Either Damian is a murderer or Beckett arrested an innocent man.
Just thinking about it is making my head hurt.
Well then forget your head, listen to your heart. ~ Richard Castle,#NFDB |
| 881:And writing in a foreign language, you come to realise how words create not only a single image but a series of images, so that if the image created in the mind of the writer is different from the image in the mind of the reader, there will not be complete understanding between them. My ~ Attia Hosain, #NFDB |
| 882:A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing. ~ Rhianna Pratchett, #NFDB |
| 883:In my naïvety, I thought people who were in rock 'n' roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren't, that they didn't even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea. ~ Bruce Dickinson, #NFDB |
| 884:It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never looked at it, not looked at it. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB |
| 885:We don't realise that we are actually perfect just the way we are. We are born perfect, but spend a lifetime trying to be something we are not, and then feel inadequate for failing. Your only purpose is to BE YOURSELF, otherwise you will deprive the universe of who you came here to be. ~ Anita Moorjani, #NFDB |
| 886:Throughout all the years that I lived in South Africa, people were to call me a fool for refusing to live life the way they did and by doing the things they did. Little did they realise that in our world, the black world, one could only survive if one played the fool, and bided his time. ~ Mark Mathabane, #NFDB |
| 887:Sometimes I'll hear a certain approach that kinda cathes my ear, like „It's kinda cool what that guy's doing there", or maybe an effect that somebody's using, or a guitar sound, or something that kinda makes me open up. But the funny thing is i realise over time how sort of traditional i am. ~ John Petrucci, #NFDB |
| 888:I used to tweet, but it's an act of futility. You're not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, 'Oh my God!' because you've opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers. ~ Sylvester Stallone, #NFDB |
| 889:We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB |
| 890:When you’re older, you will realise the only thing that matters, the only thing, is that you had courage and honour. Lose those things and you won’t die any quicker, but you’ll be less than the dirt on our boots. You’ll still be dust, but you’ll have wasted your short time in the light. ~ Conn Iggulden, #NFDB |
| 891:Man is a brute,' he said, striking the pebbles with his stick. 'A great brute. Your lordship doesn't realise this. It seems everything's been easy for you, but you ask me! A brute, I tell you! If you're cruel to him, he respects and fears you. If you're kind to him, he plucks your eyes out. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #NFDB |
| 892:My experience of ALL had made me realise that religions are both irrelevant and vitally important. Irrelevant to God, vitally important in making humans feel connected to God. It's not about any religion being the "right" one. It's about people finding ways to express their love of God to God. ~ Michelle Frost, #NFDB |
| 893:Artemisia maintained a reserved silence for as long as she could, but by the time they entered the tranquillity of the park her amicability had reasserted itself. Besides, she concluded that there was no point in ignoring a person when they were so obtuse as to not realise they were being ignored. ~ D G Rampton, #NFDB |
894:What we are you cannot realise and it is a waste of time to try and do so but you can imagine (italics mine) us on the astral plane and we can contact you through your imagination, and though your mental picture is not real or actual, the results of it are real and actual.
~ Dion Fortune, The Cosmic Doctrine,#NFDB |
| 895:You're only awake when you realise you're awake and when you're dreaming, it is just as real, whatever happens is just as real - whether you actually do die in a dream or fulfil whatever you're doing in a dream, it's, there's nobody to tell me it isn't as real as this now, because how do you know? ~ John Lennon, #NFDB |
| 896:Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don't think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you're a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been. ~ Colin Firth, #NFDB |
| 897:I’ll tell you something, something important. Write this down. You ready?’ ‘Yes, yes, I’m ready.’ ‘Love is a decision.’ ‘Love is a decision?’ ‘That’s right. A decision. Not a feeling. That’s what you young people don’t realise. That’s why you’re always off divorcing each other. No offence, dear. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB |
| 898:Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB |
| 899:That night it felt strange to be in the honey house by myself. I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realise how it had comforted me. Quietness has a strange, spungy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB |
| 900:At the same time believers realise that the defects they see in one another are tests from Allah. For this reason they don't call attention to these defects, but compensate for them by acting positively. They carefully avoid the slightest action, facial expression or word that would suggest ridicule ~ Harun Yahya, #NFDB |
| 901:… behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed; determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary. ~ Richard Flanagan, #NFDB |
| 902:At the same time believers realise that the defects they see in one another are tests from Allah. For this reason they don't call attention to these defects, but compensate for them by acting positively. They carefully avoid the slightest action, facial expression or word that would suggest ridicule. ~ Harun Yahya, #NFDB |
| 903:There is a need for aloneness, which I don't think most people realise for an actor. It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like sort of a chunk of you. ~ Marilyn Monroe, #NFDB |
| 904:My God, that scene in Monster Inc. where the monsters realise that their entire world is founded on hurting children -look at that for a change! Two galumphing cartoon characters making a shattering realisation about their world and their role in sustaining it. A truly epic moment. It's stunning. ~ Russell T Davies, #NFDB |
905:Our own place is mall perhaps, but when your old man is eaten by his own shadow, you realise that maybe in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world even seeing it.
Maybe that's what these pages of words are about:
Bringing the world to the window. ~ Markus Zusak,#NFDB |
| 906:Our tremendous drive for social acceptance and toward conformity in our time is causing us to train our children to be a generation of young liars who do not even realise they are lying. We train our children to be subtly dishonest almost from the crib. "Shh... don't cry in front of all these people. ~ Keith Miller, #NFDB |
907:Well, when it gets to that point, I want to be there.
When what gets to what point?
When you're not looking at everyone else as if they'd just declared war on you. And when you realise that things may look like the end of the world but the world still goes on, over there on the other side. ~ Kai Meyer,#NFDB |
908:We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war.
There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war.
Also they make money out of it. ~ Ernest Hemingway,#NFDB |
909:What good I thought I could do, all alone, against thousands of years of mistrust and the power of a Demonlord, I cannot now imagine: but such are the dreams of youth, too gloriously stupid to realise what cannot be done.
And without those dreams, how should we ever accomplish the impossible? ~ Elizabeth Kerner,#NFDB |
910:But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 6,#NFDB |
| 911:The one idea the Hindu religions differ in from every other in the world, the one idea to express which the sages almost exhaust the vocabulary of the Sanskrit language, is that man must realise God even in this life. ~ Swami Vivekananda in: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda [ Volume 4 ], Kartindo.com, p. 405., #NFDB |
| 912:Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice. That way, we avoid all the risks, frustrations and difficulties, and when we are old, we can always blame other people - preferably our parents, our spouses or our children - for our failure to realise our dreams. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 913:I just wanted to defend football, which is not always easy to do. Those of us who have been in the sport so many years now realise we must protect it and look after it. I was speaking about football, what it means. It is our profession, it has been our lives, and we must take care of it a little. ~ Vicente del Bosque, #NFDB |
| 914:In time I came to realise my playmates were chosen for their dullness, their lack of guile or cunning. Friends with sharper minds would have sharpened my own thoughts, made me consider that this pleasant life of luxury and plenty was in reality nothing more than an ornate cage, and I a slave within it. ~ Anthony Ryan, #NFDB |
| 915:And you realise you're doing a public service in making people happy - as a musician you can give people something a doctor, a lawyer, a politician cannot give them that. It's not scientific. It's spiritual - a good feeling. And although you don't know them personally, the audience are like your friends. ~ Billy Ocean, #NFDB |
| 916:Sometimes life carries you in different directions and you don’t even realise you’ve gone down a fork in the road; the great GPS of destiny has not followed the planned route and there has been no sign to indicate you’ve passed the point of no return. Life’s Bermuda Triangle is both myth and reality. ~ Antoine Laurain, #NFDB |
| 917:...there is beauty that hits the eye like a bolt of lightning, that burns and sears and blinds. It is more disaster than pleasure. But yours, yours is a beauty that lulls one into comfort, into not protecting one's eyes from the light, then one night you realise that the moon, too, has its beauty. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB |
| 918:Are we all clear that we want to build something that can aspire to be a world power? In other words, not just a trading bloc but a political entity. Do we realise that our nation states, taken individually, would find it far more difficult to assert their existence and their identity on the world stage. ~ Romano Prodi, #NFDB |
| 919:...it is simply more melancholy, as over the years our feelings for other people become, in proportion as we grow more aware of the ever smaller part they play in our lives and realise that the new love which we would like to be so enduring, cut short in the same moment as life itself, will be the last. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 920:I would encourage women to own their vulnerable moments. We're all human and we don't have it all together - that is perfectly okay. Admit when you're having a hard time and don't hesitate to ask for help. You will be very surprised when you realise we are all in the same boat at one time or another. ~ Lizzie Velasquez, #NFDB |
| 921:and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn’t an answer. ~ Michael Marshall Smith, #NFDB |
922:Oh.” My dad actually looked sheepish. “It’s one o’clock in the morning and I was going to tell you to shut the monkey up and go to bed. I didn’t realise what was going on in here.”
“What’s going on in here?” Cameron asked suspiciously.
“Maturity.” My dad backed out of the room and closed the door. ~ Jennifer Echols,#NFDB |
| 923:To realise your ambitions, you must take a few minutes each day to meditate on your ultimate goal, not doing anything, just thinking about it. You must try to imagine how you will feel when you achieve your dreams, and that feeling is like a memo in the mind reminding your subconscious to stay the course. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB |
| 924:A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy! ~ Iain Banks, #NFDB |
925:Holy shit.”
“Eleanor, behave.”
“You’re wearing a kilt.”
“I realise this.”
“You know I’m not capable of behaving under the best of circumstances. You are asking the impossible.
“Is this going to be a problem?”
“It is the opposite of a problem. It is the best thing that ever happened to me. ~ Tiffany Reisz,#NFDB |
| 926:In a tutorial, I distinctly remember a debate about whether racism was simply discrimination, or discrimination plus power. Thinking about power made me realise that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances. ~ Reni Eddo Lodge, #NFDB |
| 927:Some people cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 928:A gig, I realise now, is a place where people come together and give permission for anything to happen. Things can be said and shouted and sung; people get pissed; people get kissed - there is a communal agenda of joyous wilding. These are the boardroom meetings of young people, where we establish our vibe. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB |
| 929:During the 80s and 90s, we all became consumed with ourselves. In the 21st century, we've come back to simpler times. People are struggling economically and this has forced them to scale back the material aspects of their lives and realise the beauty of finding the simple joy in being with the people we love. ~ Julia Roberts, #NFDB |
| 930:I met Princess Anne once at a charity do and she said Blue Peter made her realise TV was all lies - she'd gone to Africa on safari with Valerie Singleton and they didn't see a thing, but when she watched it on TV they'd edited in some lion cubs. I was like, 'Oh dear.' I still don't know if she was joking or not. ~ Konnie Huq, #NFDB |
| 931:As a politician - particularly as a politician in a coalition - you quickly realise that compromise is a part of the game. But there are some issues where you have to draw the line - where you have to stand up and be counted, and you have to do the right thing. I think climate change is firmly in that category. ~ Edward Davey, #NFDB |
| 932:Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes). ~ Ernst Mach, #NFDB |
933:She glanced across to where Tilly and her brand new husband were posing for photographs, Tilly fluttering a fan coquettishly in front of her face. 'Unfortunately I didn't realise there was a French Revolutionary theme.'
'The Marie-Antoinette thing?' said Dexter. 'Well at least we know there'll be cake. ~ David Nicholls,#NFDB |
| 934:He burned to appease the fierce longing of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realise the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB |
| 935:I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me. ~ Alan Moore, #NFDB |
| 936:Tackling the issue of climate change presents us with an inflection point in human history - a climate justice revolution that separates development from fossil fuels, supports people in the most vulnerable situations to adapt, allows all people to take part, and, most importantly, realise their full potential. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB |
| 937:I stared out at a world that made no sense, had no coherence, just people desperately living the life that each of us has been given, instinctively sating every sick desire, stifling our anxieties about loneliness and the death-throes that start as soon as we realise we're mortal. I knew what she meant. Was. That. It? ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB |
| 938:I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed. ~ V S Naipaul, #NFDB |
| 939:Maybe it’s just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There’s a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven’t Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you’re a kid you think you’re immortal. ~ Tom Hiddleston, #NFDB |
| 940:Christ was the one washing the leper's feet so he was very, very humble, but it's not the way People are putting it down now. They feel as though God is that up there and they are that down there and they don't realise that they are God and that Christ was exactly the same as us but he realises that he was God. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB |
| 941:I think that will only really change when the human races begins to suffer some of the extremely severe consequences of climate change which may be some decades ahead. They will then realise, as we have with the financial crisis, that we are up against the wall and hitting the buffers and we have got to change. ~ Michael Meacher, #NFDB |
| 942:We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. ~ Erich Maria Remarque, #NFDB |
| 943:We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion. ~ Luke Davies, #NFDB |
| 944:You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are. ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB |
| 945:...a great part of what unmanned me was distress at the destruction of my own body. It was odd to realise that I had an emotional attachment to my own flesh. My deep desire to keep it functioning well surpassed simple avoidance of pain. A man takes pride in his body. When it is damaged, it is more than a physical thing. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB |
| 946:Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB |
| 947:I know Microsoft, I know they were only doing things because they thought they were long-reaching and long-thinking. But the world we live in now is that we have to realise, especially if you're a big corporation, if you make one step wrong, the world will leap on you, and unfairly, very unfairly, they will judge you. ~ Peter Molyneux, #NFDB |
| 948:There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB |
| 949:When he was Vice-Chancellor at Warwick University, the biologist Sir Brian Follett remarked: 'I don't like scientists on my committees. You don't know where they'll stand on any issue. Give them some more data, and they change their minds!' He understood the joke: most politicians wouldn't even realise it was a joke. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB |
| 950:You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book. ~ Michael Cunningham, #NFDB |
| 951:I'm sure many people who discover they are destined to be athletes before they know what kind, go through a period of revelation... when they realise instinctively that this is their game... I think I realised that those first couple of summers in Barellan when the War Memorial Tennis Club became my playground. ~ Evonne Goolagong Cawley, #NFDB |
| 952:We should all busy ourselves in being who we are, although many of us do not and spend so much time and energy being something else. We try to be what others want us to be, or what we ourselves want to be. And then we suddenly realise that our lives have shot past and we have not got round to being who we really ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
| 953:When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively. ~ Chris Ofili, #NFDB |
| 954:The mind of a person of uncertain purpose grows weak day by day and becomes so unsettled that he can think of nothing except what is in his mind at the moment. This does not help us to realise the atman; in fact we lose our soul. We lose our dharma, we lose the capacity for good works, lose both this world and the other. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 955:We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB |
| 956:Women don't want equal treatment, they couldn't handle it if they got it. It's a tough world out there. What a lot of women are actually looking for is special treatment. What women need to realise is that they have to toughen up, we can't ask for equal pay, you have to be paid on performance and the results you deliver. ~ Katie Hopkins, #NFDB |
| 957:There’s a point at which you may might realise the journey isn’t really for you any more. But every time you get a chance to change paths, you just stay put because it’s easier. You end up trudging along the same old way and watching as life happens to other people as you pass by. Then one day you just stop looking around you ~ K L Slater, #NFDB |
| 958:You've got to look after yourself, nothing comes for free and you've got to do the other bloke before he does you. That's what the pensioners don't realise. They might be owed something but there's nobody left to cough up. It's a different world now. The war spirit is dead and gone, packaged and sold off to the highest bidder. ~ John King, #NFDB |
| 959:I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB |
| 960:We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB |
| 961:Sometimes I can be walking down the street, or riding a bus, and suddenly I see somebody who remind me of somebody I know back home, and I close my eyes and find myself thinking of the sea, or the taste of grafted mango, or the smell of saltfish frying, and then I come back to myself and open my eyes and realise where I am. ~ Caryl Phillips, #NFDB |
| 962:A lot of guys are very intimidated by an attractive woman, and they dehumanise her because our culture perceives beautiful women as commodities. But I think if you're able walk up to a person and get to know them, and you see their flaws and their impurities, and realise that they're like you, then you can humanise them again. ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB |
| 963:I never thought I was particularly good looking. But when I see old photographs, I realise that I was. I do wish I had known that at the time because beauty is power. I didn't realise how lucky I was to be young, beautiful and in Hollywood. It didn't hit me. Every day I woke up, went to the film studio and just got on with it. ~ Joan Collins, #NFDB |
| 964:Passion. It can be used to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people, but it isn't just that. It's there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real fervour, in the certainty that one is going to realise a dream. Passion sends us signals that guide us through our lives. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
965:THOU whom we must know, understand, realise, absolute Consciousness, eternal Law, Thou who guidest and illuminest us, who movest and inspirest us, grant that these weak souls may be strengthened and those who fear be reassured. To Thee I entrust them, even as I entrust to Thee our entire destiny.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations, 127,#NFDB |
| 966:I’m sure it varies across species – some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all – but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the … expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB |
| 967:Islam is not man's ultimate justification to do as he pleases--it is, instead, a religion built on reason and evidence. If each of us asks the ustaz for the causes of his religious opinions, then we should, by doing so, help realise the principles of Islam and thus improve intellectual discussion in our own community. ~ Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, #NFDB |
| 968:Soon you’ll find yourself in more and more situations you don’t want to run from. At work you’ll realise that you’ve spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are. You are a tool being put to its proper use. That changes a lot of things. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB |
| 969:The longer you live the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldview challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being human. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 970:Do not spare a building because it is beautiful or old. Think of what it can do for you, and if the answer is that it can demonstrate your Will, then it must be pulled down to its foundations. Be an iconoclast. You’re doing these people a favour. They may realise life is more than stone and sculpture, and the gods don’t give a damn. ~ Paul Dale, #NFDB |
| 971:It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko [Ono]. She's a red hot liberationistand was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB |
| 972:When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realise, what's the big deal about success anyway? If we're all to attain everything we've been conditioned to desire - wealth, fame, education, prestige, security - then those things will become so prevalent that they'll become meaningless. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann, #NFDB |
| 973:But you begin now to realise,” said the Invisible Man, “the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter — no covering — to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB |
| 974:Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB |
| 975:Whenever I think I know something is a classic, or an amazing song, I realise it's still so subjective, because you and your friends could be talking about something, say, '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' - an amazing classic song - or someone would be like, "'Hey Jude' is an amazing song!", and I'd be like, "I don't really like it." ~ Jay Watson, #NFDB |
| 976:Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him. ~ Boethius, #NFDB |
| 977:When we are young we believe that we know everything, and so we believe that if we see no explanation for something, then no explanation exists. When we are older we realise that the whole universe works by a rhythm and a reason, even if we ourselves do not know it. It is only our own ignorance which appears to us as insanity. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB |
978:Why
should I, who have no need to work for food, spin? ' may be the question
asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the
spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the source of every coin that finds its way
into your pocket, and you will realise the truth of what I write. Every one
must spin. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,#NFDB |
| 979:But somehow, the way he looks doesn’t quite compute in the manner it should. Instead, it just makes me realise something: I’ve never met a man as handsome as him who behaves the way he does. Who wears all of his expressions on his sleeve and puts a hand up his own cardigan and doesn’t seem aware that he’s utterly, utterly lovely. ~ Charlotte Stein, #NFDB |
| 980:Realise that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself. ~ Og Mandino, #NFDB |
| 981:The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 982:Everybody is looking for happiness, as if happiness is hidden somewhere! But you must realise that happiness is everywhere, not hidden in a secret corner of life! You are a bee and everywhere is full of flowers; do not try to find a particular flower; concentrate on every flower; try to extract happiness from ever simple thing! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB |
| 983:Everyone thinks he knows what a lettuce looks like. But start to draw one and you realise the anomaly of having lived with lettuces all your life but never having seen one, never having seen the semi-translucent leaves curling in their own lettuce way, never having noticed what makes a lettuce a lettuce rather than a curly kale. ~ Frederick Franck, #NFDB |
| 984:Struck by some oddity of texture, I look again—and realise that the muddy heap has two brown eyes and a long brown beak, and that it is actually a female eider duck, its feathers comfortably fluffed out, perfectly camouflaged against the ground. “One can see why it would make a good duvet,” I say, as we stand on the walkway admiring it. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 985:Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala. ~ Lynne Truss, #NFDB |
| 986:I always thought my father [influenced me most] because he was so well read, I tried to model myself on him, but really as I go through life I realise it was my mother who gave me the most valuable instructions. I didn't understand or accept it at the time. She taught me to read and to pray - two things that have really stayed with me. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB |
987:The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the Supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscient matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,#NFDB |
| 988:I also realise power is fleeting, it doesn't last forever in this career, so I want to make the most of it. I want to make the kinds of pictures that interest me, it's as simple as that. I've never done work for money ever. If your choices are based on grosses and the film doesn't do well, what does that mean? It leaves you with nothing. ~ Tom Cruise, #NFDB |
989:I'm in love. I don't want to be in love with Jacob Coote. I want to be in love with John Barton and have people look upon me with envy, but John doesn't make me feel like this. I'm beginning to realise that things don't turn out the way you want them to.
and sometimes, when they don't, they can turn out just a little bit better. ~ Melina Marchetta,#NFDB |
| 990:There's a fine line between something saving you time and replacing a bit of you that could be useful. I've certainly become more and more aware of that. All it takes is for my phone to run out of battery and I need to find a place and I suddenly realise I have no sense of direction anymore because I'm so used to using it for that. ~ Emily Berrington, #NFDB |
| 991:I’ve always believed growing up that the story of the hero is the journey of weakness to strength. But writing about Gus taught me that the real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness, and that was a very helpful thing for me to realise in trying to tell his story, so I felt like that was kind of the gift that he gave me. ~ John Green, #NFDB |
| 992:Of course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence, this emotion, these vows of reform. You will ask why did I worry myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with one's hands folded, and so one began cutting capers. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB |
| 993:One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB |
| 994:People on the outside of situations like these often wonder why the woman go back to the abuser. I read once that 85 percent of woman return to abuse situations. That was before I realise I was in one, and when I heard the stadistic, I thought it was because the women were stupid. I thought these things about my mother more than once. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB |
| 995:You're miscarrying a baby first thing in the morning. Who wants to hear it? God bless them. It's a very strange life. I love the company of actors, but the crazier it gets, the more I've come to realise how valuable my time is with my friends who work on the land or are builders or, you know, make music. Work in offices. Run shops. ~ Andrea Riseborough, #NFDB |
| 996:The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB |
| 997:Those who have a scientific outlook on human behaviour, moreover, find it impossible to label any action as ‘sin’; they realise that what we do has its origin in our heredity, our education, and our environment, and that it is by control of these causes, rather than by denunciation, that conduct injurious to society is to be prevented. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB |
998:Greed and desire
Not peace, but fire
Coveting creation
Created damnation
Pulled alongside
A gate thrown too wide
Now our home calls
And darkness fall
"I rubbed my temples, feeling a headache coming on."A for effort, ladies, but F for clarity. You do realise that your wierd poem things never explain anything", ~ Kiersten White,#NFDB |
| 999:I think it is well . . . for the man in the street to realise there is no power on earth that can protect him from bombing, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. ~ Stanley Baldwin, #NFDB |
| 1000:As I stand in the elevator, dazed, I realise that a massive winning lottery ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present, and I start to laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run down the stairs to the street I see Clare running across Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears and I don't know why. ~ Audrey Niffenegger, #NFDB |
| 1001:So she quit working to make sense of things— we don’t realise it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB |
| 1002:Well, I don't ever get excited. I haven't been excited since I got a Chopper bicycle when I was about 12. Once you get older you realise there's always a catch to everything. So when I get, say, a commission to make a TV show, the catch is that you have to deliver something and then the sense of responsibility overwhelms the joy of the occasion. ~ Jack Dee, #NFDB |
| 1003:There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB |
| 1004:A lot of people that buy vinyl today don’t realise that they’re listening to CD masters on vinyl and that’s because the record companies have figured out that people want vinyl, And they're only making CD masters in digital, so all the new products that come out on vinyl are actually CDs on vinyl, which is really nothing but a fashion statement. ~ Neil Young, #NFDB |
| 1005:I had travelled the world and I had come to realise, in faint surprise, that I had seen no countryside that could compare in pastoral beauty with that of my own home. It takes a long time for an Australian to accept the fact that the wide, bustling, sophisticated world of the northern hemisphere cannot compare with his own land in certain ways; ~ Nevil Shute, #NFDB |
| 1006:Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB |
| 1007:What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences. The secret of antibody diversity would emerge from that. Fortunately at the time I was sufficiently ignorant of the subject not to realise how naive I was being. ~ Cesar Milstein, #NFDB |
| 1008:I am a creation of the establishment, I realise I’m not as strong as life itself, but I also realise death will suck me in. The eyes and fingers are pointing in my direction. For me, there is only one way – one road, one signpost; it reads, ‘Hell’. It’s a one-way ticket; there are no brakes on my vehicle, there is no way out, only one way in. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB |
| 1009:When I was 12 or 13, I started to watch films and understand more about the craft and that helped me to develop. But it also felt like a game, because it was fun. I mean, all of us do it when we're kids to a degree - play acting. But then I came to realise that it's a lovely way to express yourself. So, my passion for it developed as I got older. ~ Yasmin Paige, #NFDB |
| 1010:As a person, I am still very middle class. People don’t realise these things. Most of the black suits that I wear are the same. All the designer clothes I have are actually from my films. I don’t dream of Rolls Royce and things like that… People are kind enough to me to give me the nicest things in life, but it doesn’t mean that I’m used to them. ~ Shahrukh Khan, #NFDB |
| 1011:Hip hop started in NY so it's important that New Yorkers realise that to talk about NY music and its sound should not be a small-minded conversation. Music is supposed to evolve. It's supposed to be going through changes, it's not supposed to sound exactly the same as what it did when it started. NY hip hop has to be allowed to move on and grow and expand. ~ Nas, #NFDB |
| 1012:If you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it's unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realise that it's part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don't feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren't having the desired effect. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 1013:Religion can be realised. Are you ready? Do you want it? You will get the realisation if you do, and then you will be truly religious. Until you have attained realisation there is no difference between you and atheists. The atheists are sincere, but the man who says that he believes in religion and never attempts to realise it is not sincere. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
1014:[...] over the years I’ve seen so many otherwise “good” people doing horrible things to each other – husbands strangling cheating wives, brothers protecting sisters from abusive partners. In the end you realise …’
‘Realise what?’
‘That there are no “good” people. There are just those who haven’t been pushed far enough yet, and those that have. ~ Daniel Cole,#NFDB |
| 1015:There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...] ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB |
| 1016:There's a point when you're dating someone where you become aware of all the things you kind of thought you couldn't depart from. You kind of build all of these nostalgias and sort of antiquated memories in your mind, and when you're at the point during the breakup, you realise, "you know what, it actually takes a bit more than all this bullshit". ~ Matthew Healy, #NFDB |
| 1017:We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB |
| 1018:What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us. ~ Emmet Gowin, #NFDB |
| 1019:I have lived in many places over the years - sung in many languages too but hearing the Treorchy Male Choir made me realise how deep my feelings are, and always will be, for our beloved Land of Song. Glorious years of hard work and glorious music! Well done! I am only half Welsh - but these sincere good wishes and congratulations come from all of me! ~ Petula Clark, #NFDB |
| 1020:For, why is the triumph of Nihilism inevitable now? Because the very values current amongst us to-day will arrive at their logical conclusion in Nihilism,—because Nihilism is the only possible outcome of our greatest values and ideals,—because we must first experience Nihilism before we can realise what the actual worth of these “values” was.... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB |
| 1021:sipping wine or preparing food. The whole time their baby alone in the garden. I followed her when Chris played golf. It broke my heart how she neglected Ben. She was always more interested in her photography than she was in her baby. I waited for her to return that night. I couldn’t understand why they were so late getting back. Didn’t she realise the ~ Lynda Renham, #NFDB |
| 1022:Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realise that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB |
| 1023:It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB |
| 1024:The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue. This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea. ~ Niall Williams, #NFDB |
| 1025:Dad and I find ash, I said, up on the moor tops at home, people say they want to be scattered there as if scattering is making something go away entirely and then we sit down with our sandwiches and realise we're in the middle of someone's granny, of course they always choose the places you'd stop for lunch, somewhere on the top of a ridge with a nice view. ~ Sarah Moss, #NFDB |
| 1026:If the man who observes the myriad stars, and considers that they and their innumerable satellites move in their serene dignity through the heavens, each swinging clear of the other's orbit-if, I say, the man who sees this cannot realise the Creator's attributes without the help of the book of Job, then his view of things is beyond my understanding. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB |
| 1027:I had to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB |
| 1028:According to the consumer mentality that epitomises our era, the customer is always right — so only I know what is good and bad for me. The coach's job is to help me learn about myself and my preferences, but not to dictate them to me. They must reflect my wishes and help me realise my goals. The coach asks questions, but the answers come from within me. ~ Svend Brinkmann, #NFDB |
| 1029:It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB |
| 1030:My career has taken so many different paths to this point that I've come to realise that we're all the same, everywhere I've been. We're all just creatures trying to tell stories as good as we can, so whether that's in a tiny theatre or as part of the biggest multi-million dollar film, we're all still just trying to tell a good story at the end of the day. ~ Mireille Enos, #NFDB |
| 1031:O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB |
| 1032:The hood made me realise that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB |
| 1033:To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping. ~ Richard Flanagan, #NFDB |
| 1034:Step off the path, and maybe you'd get back and maybe you wouldn't, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realise that that's actually pretty much how it's always been, and if you think any different, it's because you've never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit thin on the ground. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 1035:I had begun to realise how much I'd adapted to Keith's needs and preferences. Just small stuff: what time we went to bed, which side I slept on, not cooking cauliflower. Allowances and adaptions anyone in a long-term relationship has to make, accumulating over time. But I wasn't in a relationship anymore. I wanted to know what of myself needed to be reclaimed. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB |
| 1036:I realise that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism, but to me it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love . . . but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them. ~ Paule Marshall, #NFDB |
| 1037:The Replacements definitely changed my life, I think they're just amazing. The thing that blew me away [a band like that] is that you'll get into a band from hearing one interesting song and then you'll realise that you've got seven or eight albums to listen to afterwards and every single one of them is a great record. The Replacements definitely changed my life. ~ Ryan Jarman, #NFDB |
| 1038:I realise that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors - but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch, in the next 200 years, will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. My regret will have been that I could not behold its demise. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB |
| 1039:My friends ... they usually rib me about how I just sleep in and watch Oprah and that I don't really have a proper job. I've given up arguing now, so I just agree with them, even though half the time I realise I've started work before they have. Still, it's best to keep the romantic idea alive. If they call around midday and ask if they woke me, I always say yes. ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB |
| 1040:We know that modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become 'experience', transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 1041:It is-or seems to be-a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB |
| 1042:People call love sickness heartache, but that's not where you feel rejection. Your heart only responds to excitement and fear - racing, pounding, skipping beats. You feel rejection in the pit of your stomach. It's like the moment you realise you've eaten bad food, and you know that all you've got to look forward to is a night of twisted torment and twisted sheets. ~ Paul Cornell, #NFDB |
| 1043:Catastrophe Theory is-quite likely-the first coherent attempt (since Aristotelian logic) to give a theory on analogy. When narrow-minded scientists object to Catastrophe Theory that it gives no more than analogies, or metaphors, they do not realise that they are stating the proper aim of Catastrophe Theory, which is to classify all possible types of analogous situations. ~ Rene Thom, #NFDB |
| 1044:It is—or seems to be—a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB |
| 1045:When we won the league at Tottenham, they came back 2-2 in the last-minute of the game, and they're celebrating - because they're happy to draw against us, obviously. And I remember saying to Mauricio Tarricco, do you realise we only need a point to be Champions? And they all [were really shocked]. So I said 'Yes. Now we're going to celebrate on your pitch. Bye bye!' ~ Thierry Henry, #NFDB |
| 1046:If globalization is to realise its potential as a force for good, we have to look more closely at the means by which we handle our growing interdependence. We do not have a world government, but we do have an increasingly complex network of institutions that are concerned with global governance. They are central to our future and international human rights law ~ Gro Harlem Brundtland, #NFDB |
| 1047:Let but a single flash of reality -- the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind -- enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 1048:So many people limit themselves by holding onto that baggage. They cut themselves off at the knees. And for me, meeting my father, and seeing how he was, and seeing that other side of where I came from, allowed me to kind of ascend spiritually. Now not to get all hippy or anything, but, you cant realise your potential unless you LET yourself realise your own potential. ~ Corey Taylor, #NFDB |
| 1049:When you meet these outstanding leaders who have been through a programme that empowers them to take positive action, to make things better for people, for animals and for the environment - when you watch them interact and they start brainstorming, you realise you can relax, because they have got it right. They understand that there's more to this life than just money. ~ Jane Goodall, #NFDB |
| 1050:If you [can realise Brahman] by standing on your head, or on one foot, or by worshipping five thousand gods with three heads each — welcome to it! ... Do it any way you can! Nobody has any right to say anything. Therefore, Krishna says, if your method is better and higher, you have no business to say that another man’s method is bad, however wicked you may think it. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1051:At Cambridge I took minor (John major) part in a Virginia Woolf centenary conference. As I hadn’t read any VW since school (possibly college) days, I felt bound to reread at least all the novels. It’s super to wake up now in the morning and realise I don’t have to read a Virginia Woolf novel today. I am prepared to admire some of the stuff but do not like either it or her ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB |
| 1052:Gradually, physicists began to realise that nature, at the atomic level, does not appear as a mechanical universe composed of fundamental building blocks, but rather as a network of relations, and that, ultimately, there are no parts at all in this interconnected web. Whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures our attention. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB |
| 1053:You have a tendency to just remember the bad times and bad moments. I think that often it's the way of life. Yet the rewards we got from it were fantastic and we played a lot of shows to sellout audiences in I don't know how many cities. I just think we didn't realise how insane it was until we were actually right in the middle of it and couldn't stop. We just couldn't stop. ~ Dave Gahan, #NFDB |
| 1054:Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB |
| 1055:You must realise now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fileds, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. ~ Josemaria Escriva, #NFDB |
| 1056:I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB |
| 1057:I do have a sense of fear every day going to work, but I think it's something that I like. I mean I do like the feeling of waking up on my own, having this moment of like: "Oh, f**k, I hope I can do this today!" Because it makes you realise that you're working with material or you're working with a director or you're working with a cast and they're keeping you on your toes. ~ Charlize Theron, #NFDB |
| 1058:You can always tell when an actor has grown a 'rhino skin' to protect themselves. It comes across on screen, and they aren't believable. They're dead in the eyes because they've been told a million times that they're the greatest actor that ever lived. If you don't realise what's happening, and get your feet back on the ground, it can be the worst thing that ever happens to you. ~ Emma Stone, #NFDB |
| 1059:You can make a joke of it, when I — . But I don’t think, Miss Boncassen, you at all realise what I feel. As to settlements and all that, your father could do what he likes with me.” “My father has nothing to do with it, and I don’t know what settlements mean. We never think anything of settlements in our country. If two young people love each other they go and get married. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB |
| 1060:I hope that the outside world will realise that Hitler's government has no idea of steering towards war, even though this has often been asserted abroad. As Adolf Hitler himself has said, Germany has no need of another war to avenge the loss of her military honour, because she never lost that honour. Germany does not want war of any kind. Germany wants real and abiding peace. ~ Rudolf Hess, #NFDB |
| 1061:I'm an idiot, basically. I don't think that I'm a dumb guy, but I also realise that I have access to about 0.1 percent of the information that I need to have a truly informed opinion about half the stuff I talk about. I'm like that loud guy in the bar, who kind of makes sense for about ten minutes, and then you realise he flunked everything at high school so you just laugh at him. ~ Bill Burr, #NFDB |
| 1062:She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before. and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realise why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did. ~ Kate Chopin, #NFDB |
| 1063:Before prayer, endeavour to realise Whose Presence you are approaching and to Whom you are about to speak, keeping in mind Whom you are addressing. If our lives were a thousand times as long as they are we should never fully understand how we ought to behave towards God, before Whom the very Angels tremble, Who can do all He wills, and with Whom to wish is to accomplish. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #NFDB |
| 1064:Everyone not already following their own path would begin to feel dissatisfied with themselves and be forced to make a choice: they would either have to accept an existence beset with disappointment and pain or else come to realise that everyone was born to be happy. Having made their choice, they would have no option but to change, and the great struggle, the Jihad, would begin. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 1065:I think all musicians and producers, they know the real goal is to come up with a record that is entertaining and not boring, that's the goal. I think if everyone agrees that that's the goal then it doesn't matter who's the band and it doesn't matter who's the producer. It just means that that you try to realise the ambition no matter what the situation is or who the people are. ~ Black Francis, #NFDB |
| 1066:You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . . (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s . . .) —Luis Buñuel ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB |
| 1067:At first I wonder if they are brothers; now I remember to wonder if they are robbers or rapists or murderers who've hired suits and photocopied leaflets in a cunning ploy to insinuate themselves into the quiet bungalows of defenceless strangers on hills in middles-of-nowhere, and I realise it would be very stupid to invite them in so they can see for themselves there's no garda here. ~ Sara Baume, #NFDB |
| 1068:Because this woman sobbed in the way that all women sob, whether they do it outwardly or whether they keep it silently locked up inside themselves. They sob because they realise, one day, that they were born on a planet of men, and that short of death or spinsterhood they can never escape. Effie's Aunt Rachel used to say, 'Even the slaves could run away, but where can women go? ~ Graham Masterton, #NFDB |
| 1069:It would take a while for me to realise that each of my children had given me as much as they took. My memories of them, bittersweet and constant, were as powerful as a physical presence. And because of that, as a bus bore me into the heart of a city I did not know, while my last child was dying in Lagos and the country was unraveling, I was not afraid because I was not alone. ~ Ay ba mi Ade ba y, #NFDB |
| 1070:Knowledge of yourself may involve, if we are learning at the present time, a knowledge of the way of thinking of your society and to realise that you are probably its product, and that this knowledge can be attained in fact by such anthropological and psychological observations made by the Sufis in the course of their teaching how to pursue new and more promising extra perspectives. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
| 1071:By rebuilding community, we will renew democracy and the hope we invest in it. We will develop political systems that are not so big that they cannot respond to us but not so small that they cannot meet the problems we face. We will achieve something that, paradoxically, we cannot realise alone: self-reliance. By helping each other, we help ourselves. The strong, embedded cultures ~ George Monbiot, #NFDB |
1072:O trees of life, O when are you wintering?
We are not unified. We have no instincts
like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,
we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,
and fall down to an indifferent lake.
We realise flowering and fading together.
And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,
as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,#NFDB |
| 1073:Anyone who practises sport knows this: if you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it's unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realise that it's part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don't feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren't having the desired effect. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 1074:We human beings don’t realise how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, a nose which smells the beauty of fragrance, and two ears to hear the words of love. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB |
| 1075:Before prayer, endeavour to realise Whose Presence you are approaching and to Whom you are about to speak, keeping in mind Whom you are addressing. If our lives were a thousand times as long as they are we should never fully understand how we ought to behave towards God, before Whom the very Angels tremble, Who can do all He wills, and with Whom to wish is to accomplish. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, [T7], #NFDB |
| 1076:For in Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging; India has already emerged. And it is my firm belief that the relationship between the United States and India - bound by our shared interests and values - will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century. This is the partnership I have come here to build. This is the vision that our nations can realise together. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB |
| 1077:One of the things I admire so much about Atom Egoyan is that again and again he makes movies about the human condition, who we are, what we want, how we communicate to one another and this is also an exploration of a long-term relationship and what happens in it. There's human sexuality and all those kinds of things, so that helps - it all helps. You realise that I'm not a Playboy bunny. ~ Julianne Moore, #NFDB |
| 1078:Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there's something very liberating about it; once you realise that you don't need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That's the thing: it's best just to take care of yourself. You can't protect other people, however hard you try. You try, and you fail, and your world collapses around you, burns down to ashes. ~ Gail Honeyman, #NFDB |
| 1079:Ordinary Americans, and especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted -- while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with locked antlers. ~ Timothy Garton Ash, #NFDB |
| 1080:You can’t always pinpoint the precise moment that your life goes wrong. Most of the time it creeps up on you, year by year, moment by moment, until one day you look around and realise you’re so far from who you used to be you don’t even feel like the same person. It’s usually a gradual collapse, sneaking – a stone there, a pebble here; a slow erosion of who you are, bit by bit, piece by piece. ~ Eva Woods, #NFDB |
| 1081:It had the effect of cementing the Anglo-American alliance. What's the good of having bases if when you want to use them you're not allowed to by the home country. It made America realise that Britain was her real and true friend, when they were hard up against it and wanted something, and that no one else in Europe was. They're a weak lot, some of them in Europe you know. Weak. Feeble. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB |
| 1082:London, then, was on my side of the cockpit. The city grew bigger before it became smaller. From above, still climbing, you realise that this is how a city becomes its own map, how a place becomes whole before your eyes, how from an aeroplane the idea of a city and the image of a city itself can overlay each other so perfectly that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between them. We ~ Mark Vanhoenacker, #NFDB |
| 1083:It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB |
| 1084:If you weren't here I wouldn't see it," said Ingram, firmly believing it in the face of the fact that nothing ever escaped his acute vision. "I see all this only through you. You are my eyes. Without you I go blind, I grope about with the light gone out. You don't know what you are to me, you little shining crystal thing—you don't begin to realise it, my dear, my dear sweet Found-at-Last. ~ Elizabeth von Arnim, #NFDB |
1085:Sometimes you see someone doing something that does not fit at all with your idea of that person. You realise that, a lot of the time, you don't really know people, even one of your best friends.
Instead, you get to know a little bit about that person - the little things they want to reveal, or inadvertently reveal - and then you make up a whole lot of rubbish that's your idea of the person. ~ Steph Bowe,#NFDB |
| 1086:Serena maintains today that as George grew older he also grew out of his mind. Many men do, in my experience. Life does not come up to their expectations: they grow older, and disappointed. At fifty they realise others have passed them by, made more money, won more respect. Their sexual drive fades and the self-esteem that goes with it. They take to litigation and shake their fists at other drivers. ~ Fay Weldon, #NFDB |
| 1087:That Self, Lord, Brahman we would know that we may realise our unity with it and with all that it manifests and in that unity we would live. For we demand of knowledge that it shall unite; the knowledge that divides must always be a partial knowing good for certain practical purposes; the knowledge that unites is the knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge, #NFDB |
| 1088:Here is my prophecy. Witchcraft is going to get both aroused and angrier. Nature will rise. We are not only coming for your children, we are your children and all those who will inherit the ruins of the world. Welcome to the Apocalypse. This is the moment when we realise that the climate is broken. It's all blood and roses from here on in. As witches we should prepare to fly on the wings of the storm. ~ Peter Grey, #NFDB |
| 1089:I'd always thought that heavy metal - what I knew of it, anyway - was for tragic losers with acne and inch-thick glasses who fantasised about slaying dragons and riding Harleys, failing to realise at the time that the only loser was me. Fortunately, a good friend of mine played me 'Battery' from Metallica's Master Of Puppets album and the scales fell instantly from my eyes. It was a total revelation. ~ Joel McIver, #NFDB |
| 1090:The bible is very resonant. It has everything, creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the bible and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan. Of course there are stories that are still relevant and inspiring; lessons that need to be taught over and over again. And they give people hope. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB |
| 1091:Thus to act under the guidance coming from above, this is one side of the sadhana, the dynamic side. The other one is the discrimination between the Purusha and the Prakriti. The Purusha will calmly observe, give sanction, choose, but will realise that all this does not belong to him - all these are outside him. This is the static side of the sadhana. These two aspects constitute the basis of Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB |
| 1092:They ignore their own,” Gallagher pipes up–the first time he’s spoken. “Don’t even seem to realise they’re there. I think they must smell different.” “But she’s not safe from the junkers,” Justineau goes on, ignoring him. “And she’s not safe from any other refusenik human enclaves there might be around here. They’ll just trap her and douse her with quicklime without even realising what she is.” “They’ll ~ M R Carey, #NFDB |
| 1093:As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention. ~ Chris Kraus, #NFDB |
| 1094:Let but a single real feature—the little that one distinguishes of a woman seen from afar or from behind—enable us to project the form of beauty before our eyes, we imagine that we have seen her before, our heart beats, we hasten in pursuit, and will always remain half-persuaded that it was she, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 1095:their careers. Roles are like apparel, worn for specific situations. When participants are from different cultures, as in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge example, they often assume that everyone shares a similar understanding of roles, structures and meanings of the joint act they are engaging in. But they rarely realise that each participant possesses a separate interpretation of their joint activity. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB |
| 1096:Have you ever felt a potential love for someone? Like, you don't actually love them and you know you don't, but you know you could. You realise that you could easily fall in love with them. It's almost like the bud of a flower, ready to blossom but it's just not quite there yet. And you like them a lot, you really do. You think about them often, but you don't love them. You could, though. You know you could. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB |
| 1097:In practice, you realise that most attempts to feed your baby in a public space will be met with subtle but palpable resistance. Older chaps roll their eyes, slick young businesswomen purse their mouths, teenagers look disgusted, waitresses anxious. But it strikes me as ironic that many members of the public fret about British Muslims donning the hijab, yet happily condone the veiling of nursing mothers. ~ Rowan Pelling, #NFDB |
| 1098:I'm happy that my films were discovered by chance by foreign film festivals. That makes me realise more that there is a world outside Japan too. For me, it's an occasion to meet many people and to experience directly the response of international audiences to my films. But for me as a director, my attitude towards making films hasn't changed with the fame. I feel it's not good to change as a person anyway ~ Takashi Miike, #NFDB |
| 1099:I'm a person who's trying to live within divine law, to the best and it's very hard because it's self-discipline, because the more you realise, the more you've got to get yourself straight, so it's hard, you know. I'm trying and there are a lot of people who are trying, even people who are not conscious that they are doing it, but they are really doing things for the good, or just to be happy or whatever. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB |
| 1100:Once our anger has settled down and our rational mind is back in action, we realise the damage we have done to ourselves and to other people in the fit of rage. Even the most sagacious man can become a beast when he loses his temper. But remember that just like a house burnt by fire can’t be brought back even after the fire is dowsed, no amount of repentance can restore the damage caused by your lost temper. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB |
| 1101:Rock 'n' roll and playing live is very addictive. But you have to really be careful, because you don't want to do it all the time. It's like when you are young and you think if you are not having sex you're wasting your time. But as you get older you realise everything has its place. It's the same thing with performing.... Performing is a great thing to do but you don't want to have to be doing it every night. ~ Mick Jagger, #NFDB |
| 1102:There was also a dark-haired man of about thirty (BMI approximately twenty) who appeared not to have shaved for several days, and, beside him, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. In contrast to the complexity of Bianca’s costume, she was wearing a green dress with zero decoration, so minimal that it did not even have straps to hold it in place. It took me a moment to realise that its wearer was Rosie. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB |
| 1103:Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 1104:Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity... Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self-deceptions. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 1105:Like the fact that the person Sirius cared most about in the world was you," said Dumbledore quietly. "Like the fact that you were coming to regard Sirius as a mixture of father and brother. Voldemort knew already, of course, that Sirius was in the Order, and that you knew where he was -- but Kreacher's information made him realise that the one person for whom you would go to any lengths to rescue was Sirius Black. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 1106:I do remain optimistic that one day the world will realise that carbon dioxide is more of a friend than an enemy to the earth's flora and fauna, and I do seriously believe that, given the extraordinary complexity of the natural forces controlling our climate, which have done so for millions of years, the only sensible policy response to the natural process of climate change is prudent and cost-effective adaptation. ~ Nick Minchin, #NFDB |
| 1107:In some ways, a long marriage is a bit like embarking on a journey. There’s a point at which you may might realise the journey isn’t really for you any more. But every time you get a chance to change paths, you just stay put because it’s easier. You end up trudging along the same old way and watching as life happens to other people as you pass by. Then one day you just stop looking around you … and well, here we are. ~ K L Slater, #NFDB |
| 1108:We see and realise that the political situation in the United States is influenced by those who have lost the elections but refuse to accept their defeat, and who continue to use the anti-Russia card and various allegations most actively in the political infighting. This is why we are in no hurry, we are ready to wait, yet we strongly hope that Russian-US relations will become normal again sometime in the future. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB |
| 1109:I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn't know about it yet. It's so hard for women - even nice women - to realise that their bodies are not irresistible. ~ Raymond Chandler, #NFDB |
| 1110:You didn’t have to spend long in Rust’s company to realise that he had no threshold. He would escalate any situation with startling rapidity to the point where he could count it as a victory, which meant the other party had to lose. His wasn’t a personality built to last. At least, not in a society with laws and police to enforce them. But he would make quite a mess before he was finished. I was pretty sure of that! ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB |
| 1111:He also told me that I had no option but to forget all my relatives and friends in Northern Ireland, and that I had to realise that because of the IRA’s international contacts, I would have to accept that my life would always be at risk. He told me that once I had left the Province I would be on my own, and they would not be able to guarantee my life, nor the lives of Angie and the boys if they should join me. I ~ Martin McGartland, #NFDB |
| 1112:It is in our nature that if someone points out our fault, we immediately resist and justify ourselves and try to prove the other person wrong by advancing logic and reasons that support our beliefs. If we don't have reasons to support our faith, we avoid any discussion and even ignore the person, but we try to always hold on to our beliefs. The only way we can change our belief is when we ourselves realise our mistakes. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB |
| 1113:Survivorship bias can become especially pernicious when you become a member of the ‘winning’ team. Even if your success stems from pure coincidence, you’ll discover similarities with other winners and be tempted to mark these as ‘success factors’. However, if you ever visit the graveyard of failed individuals and companies, you will realise that its tenants possessed many of the same traits that characterise your success. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB |
| 1114:I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 1115:For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB |
| 1116:I had been used to improvising and even in the audition I was feeling free to rearrange Aaron Sorkin words a little bit, as lovely as they were. I didn't find out until after I got the part how furious Aaron was at me for doing that. They said, "He was livid. He did everything in his power not to jump down your throat!" But I came to realise that Aaron was writing in metre and the rhythm of the language is very important. ~ Richard Schiff, #NFDB |
| 1117:Even in small matters, we can say, our intellect is not resolute. It will be resolute only if we fix our minds on one purpose and cling to it with discrimination, only if we work without looking for immediate results. At present, whether in politics or social reform we leap from one branch to another. I began with the illustration of a ball of earth and told you that, even if we concentrate on that, we can realise the atman. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
| 1118:When I started dating I had this kind of Romeo and Juliet, fateful, romantic idea about love. It was almost that you were a victim - that there was a lot of pain involved and that was how it should be. Shakespeare said the course of true love never did run smooth and I had a sense it had to be painful. It was such a revelation to realise it shouldn't be that way and you get to choose who you love and who you give your heart to. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB |
| 1119:Is it not truly extraordinary to realise that ever since men have walked, no-one has ever asked why they walk, how they walk, whether they walk, whether they might walk better, what they achieve by walking, whether they might not have the means to regulate, change or analyse their walk: questions that bear on all the systems of philosophy, psychology and politics with which the world is preoccupied? Honoré de Balzac (1938 [1833]: ~ Tim Ingold, #NFDB |
| 1120:Sometimes I decide not to make something because I am proud and think I am better than that - and then I realise I have to pay the rent and I have to take something which is even worse than all the other stuff they offer you because you were being so proud not to take it! But you adjust and sometimes for one reason or another there is no strategy at the end but there is the ability to do the best that you can with what you have. ~ Salma Hayek, #NFDB |
| 1121:He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB |
| 1122:I had to come here to realise the full stature of men: here outside a grass hut, on a rough wooden bench, with no noise, no crowds, no appointments, no axe to grind, no secret to conceal, all the space and time in the world, and my heart as translucent as the glass of tea in my hand. The sense of affinity with these men is so strong that I would tear down every building in the West if I thought it would bring us together like this. ~ Ted Simon, #NFDB |
| 1123:It took me a long time, my lifetime so to speak, to realise that the colour of an eye half seen, or the source of some distant sound, are closer to Giudecca in the hell of unknowing than the existence of God, or the origins of protoplasm, or the eistence of self, and even less worthy than these to occupy the wise, It's a bit much, a lifetime, to achieve this consoling conclusion, it doesn't leave you much time to profit by it. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB |
1124:Demanding Companion
O ye troublesome
stomach of mine!
You are not agreeing
to forgo
your habitual meal
even for a day;
Nor would you accept
in one lot
food for two days –
today and tomorrow.
You do not realise
even for a moment
the travails I am put to
on your account!
All I can say,
O stomach of mine
is that it is indeed
an arduous task
to live with you!
~ Avvaiyar,#NFDB |
| 1125:I walk up a dune to a beach and look out to sea, but it's 100km away. The ships lie askew in their dry beds, at anchor for ever. Today is my son's birthday. Thousands of miles from here, his healthy lungs are blowing out candles. I should be there but I'm here with another boy, who puts his face close to mine and laughs. I smile back but realise he can't see it, because I'm wearing an antiseptic muzzles to protect me from his breath. ~ A A Gill, #NFDB |
| 1126:I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB |
| 1127:Nelson nods again. ‘It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise you’d do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do. And that’s the hardest thing. ~ Elly Griffiths, #NFDB |
| 1128:Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB |
| 1129:'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws. ~ Marion Cotillard, #NFDB |
| 1130:The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy. ~ Clive James, #NFDB |
| 1131:Homophobia and the closet are allies. Like an unhealthy co-dependent relationship they need each other to survive. One plays the victim living in fear and shame while the other plays the persecutor policing what is ‘normal’. The only way to dismantle homophobia is for every gay man and lesbian in the world to come out and live authentic lives. Once they realise how normal we are and see themselves in us….the controversy is over. ~ Anthony Venn Brown, #NFDB |
| 1132:What I didn't understand was that the personal and the political go together. I felt at the time I had to sacrifice my children's present for their future. It seemed an either/or. I didn't realise that by being with one's own children I would have had a better understanding of the ones who are not my own. I was thinking of them but I didn't spend the time that they needed from me. It's a tribute to them that they came out so well. ~ Vanessa Redgrave, #NFDB |
| 1133:If an American is motoring on his own, he (the paragon of morality and chastity) will slow down and stop beside every solitary pretty female pedestrian, bare his teeth in a big smile, and tempt her into his car with a wild roll of the eyes. A lady who fails to appreciate his passion will qualify as an idiot who doesn't realise how lucky she is to have the opportunity of getting to know the owner of this 100-horse-power motor car. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky, #NFDB |
| 1134:If an American is motoring on his own, he (the paragon of morality and chastity) will slow down and stop beside every solitary pretty female pedestrian, bare his teeth in a big smile, and tempt her into his car with a wild roll of the eyes. A lady who fails to appreciate his passion will qualify as an idiot who doesn’t realise how lucky she is to have the opportunity of getting to know the owner of this 100-horse-power motor car. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky, #NFDB |
| 1135:If I was in charge of the dictionary I would have a right clear-out of words. Words like ‘necrophilia’ I’d get rid of. If someone has that (attraction to dead bodies), I’d make them say, ‘I fancy dead bodies’. Then, at least when they tell people, they might realise how mental it sounds rather than it being hidden in a posh word. And then they’ll stop having the problem. The fact that it has its own word makes it seem more acceptable. ~ Karl Pilkington, #NFDB |
| 1136:Let us realise [that] we are the infinite power. Who put a limit to the power of mind? Let us realise we are all mind. Every drop has the whole of the ocean in it. That is the mind of man. The Indian mind reflects upon these [powers and potentialities] and wants to bring [them] all out. For himself he doesn't care what happens. It will take a great length of time [to reach perfection]. If it takes fifty thousand years, what of that! ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1137:The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB |
| 1138:It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realise that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB |
| 1139:The unflagging optimism and constant good nature of the Tibetan people challenges us to identify the source of our misery and discontent. Most of the time when we examine it, we realise we have little to be upset about at all. It is simply our lack of control over our own lives that causes us the majority of our own suffering. Attack the real root of the situation, and we can solve the problem. But any other action simply causes more problems. ~ James Oroc, #NFDB |
1140:Dear Dick, I guess it's been a case of infatuation... Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone.
... Whereas the sex-infatuations that's male *you, Shake, the priest) leap out of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it's like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating under the surface. Wanting sex to realise things I knew. ~ Chris Kraus,#NFDB |
| 1141:As a young woman working in journalism, I assumed harassment and discrimination came with the territory and that you just had to get on with the job. As I rose to senior positions, it took me awhile to realise that just because I'd survived relatively unscathed didn't mean the younger women joining the profession would do so, and it isn't until you hit a certain age that the reality of ageism - which is much more acute for women - kicks in. ~ Catherine Mayer, #NFDB |
| 1142:Why wish for something that will never be? It ends in nothing but heartbreak. We wish, then we think about how things would be if our wishes came true. And we feel happy thinking about those things. But then we wake up and realise that our wishes don’t have wings. And it hurts because all the happiness that we thought of, was never real. Hold on to what you have, try to find your happiness in what is, rather than what should or could have been. ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB |
| 1143:And so I realise that I want for myself the vibrant substratum of the word repeated in a Gregorian chant. I’m aware that everything I know I cannot say, I know only by paining or pronouncing syllables blind of meaning. And if here I have to use words for you, they must create an almost exclusively bodily meaning. I’m battling with the ultimate vibration. To tell you my substratum I make a sentence of words composed only of the now-instants. ~ Clarice Lispector, #NFDB |
| 1144:I don't know whether it's spiritual development or trying to learn the psychologically with being an actor, but I realise the more I get into it that this was something I was always supposed to do. That allowed me to sit easiser in the life I was living. But that doesn't mean to say you just stroll through it. It takes work and the work is not always about acting. It's sometimes about how you deal with the ups and downs of hope, of expectation. ~ Gerard Butler, #NFDB |
| 1145:[Not parroting.] My old Master used to say, "It is all very good to teach the parrot to say, 'Lord, Lord, Lord' all the time; but let the cat come and take hold of its neck, it forgets all about it" [You may] pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are, [but] unless you realise the soul there is no freedom. Not talking, theorising, argumentation, but realisation. That I call practical religion. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1146:We think we’ve got over things, don’t we? We think we’ve made our peace with trauma, that we’re strong again. We keep going, we smile, we manage day to day. Then something comes along, something so very small compared to things we’ve faced before, something we think we can more than handle, and it floors us once more. And we realise we’re not strong after all. The fault lines have not healed over. We’re not living, not really. We’re still surviving. ~ S E Lynes, #NFDB |
| 1147:I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB |
| 1148:Like no one else... you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places... The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon... or books that have meant more to me than I can explain... This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world... The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible. ~ Vera Brittain, #NFDB |
| 1149:Often there is no dramatic reason for discontent in marriages. It seeps in slowly over the years. You don’t even notice it creeping up. It happens, trickle by trickle. You do not realise when or how the easy familiarity gets replaced by a ‘taken-for-granted’ attitude over the years. By the time you do, it is often too late. Habits have been formed, patterns have been set. And a comfort-zone has been established. A zone that is hard to get out of. ~ Preeti Shenoy, #NFDB |
| 1150:that we cannot even realise the idea of equality, and here in England we have been taught to hate the word by the evil effects of those absurd attempts which have been made elsewhere to proclaim it as a fact accomplished by the scratch of a pen or by a chisel on a stone. We have been injured in that, because a good word signifying a grand idea has been driven out of the vocabulary of good men. Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB |
| 1151:I had a vision of you, the first time I stepped into Grey House, the night Edward died. That was why I kept staring at you while he lay on the bed, convulsing between us. I had seen you standing before me, your hand in mine. I could not hear what was said between us, but there was a sense of belonging to you, as if I had always known you somehow, and you had been waiting for me. It came as rather a nasty shock to realise you were already married. ~ Deanna Raybourn, #NFDB |
| 1152:At first I assumed he was a Mexican, but slowly began to realise that a real Mexican probably wouldn't be wearing a sombrero in a London nightclub. And he'd probably have a real moustache, not a stick-on one. A Mexican with a stick-on moustache would be like a Super-Mexican, because he'd have two moustaches, and that'd be cool, because a Super-Mexican could probably use his poncho as a cape, and then I realised I was saying all this to the man's face. ~ Danny Wallace, #NFDB |
| 1153:Anyone who has walked through the deserted palaces of Versailles or Vienna realise how much of a part of the life of a nation is lost when a monarchy is abolished. If buckingham palace and windsor castle were transformed into museums, if one politician competed against another for president of the republic, Britain would be a sadder and less interesting place. Our politicians are not men such as could challenge more than a thousand years of history. ~ William Rees Mogg, #NFDB |
| 1154:It's not just money. Part of it is, but not all. You greasers have a different set of values. You're more emotional. We're sophistocated- cool to the point of not feeling anything. Nothing is for real with us. You know sometimes I'll catch myself talking to a girl-friend, and realise i don't mean half of what I'm saying. I don't really think a beer blast on the river bottom is supercool, but I'll rave about one to a girl-friend just to be saying something. ~ S E Hinton, #NFDB |
1155:... and I realise the only way to tell the others
is through the way my voice can take these broken words
and turn it into music.
Turn it into poetry.
And I sing to make myself come alive,
but also for you,
because I’d like this to mean something.
To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day
and so now I will tell.
If not for you, then for my own heart,
because it tells me to,
and I'm learning to listen. ~ Charlotte Eriksson,#NFDB |
| 1156:To paraphrase an old Afrikaans idiom; it is necessary to eat a bag of salt with these people to realise the extent of their misery and suffering within touching distance of one of the wealthiest little communities to be found on any continent. For those who wish to follow in my footsteps, it’s all there for the taking but it requires moments of considerable insight, humility and understanding of the frailties of human nature. Some would call it compassion. ~ Al J Venter, #NFDB |
| 1157:were suddenly up for discussion. In all sorts of ways, the American society of the 1950s was in a state of fermentation: black citizens wanted equal rights; students and artists were experimenting in a bid to find alternatives to the consumer society; conservatives were carrying out experiments of their own in an attempt to hold on to their religion and traditions; and women had begun to realise they were suffocating in the pretty-pretty life of the suburbs. ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB |
| 1158:...when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB |
| 1159:Everyone used to chuck snails at each other at school, and I used to try and save them. And not only did I get in trouble for it, I got suspended for doing it. For saving the snails I kept about four or five hundred of them at the back of the class -- in Snail Land. We were like six or seven or something, people didn't even realise what they were doing. I had a strange compassion for snails. And the teacher just chucked them all in the trash in the end. ~ Robert Pattinson, #NFDB |
| 1160:so you did everything that was prophesied about you. But nothing’s really over. You didn’t overcome anything. That curse is branded on your soul even deeper than before. You should realise that by now. That curse is part of your DNA. You breathe out the curse, the wind carries it to the four corners of the earth, but the dark confusion inside you remains. Your fear, anger, unease – nothing’s disappeared. They’re all still inside you, still torturing you. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB |
| 1161:Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it. ~ Alan Bennett, #NFDB |
| 1162:Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realise that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign … to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection for ever. It is in your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
1163:Menindee
Today it is
dark clouds
moving in from the west,
a deep brown-purple, the colour of sky
before a sand-storm on the desert’s edge.
A dog is barking somewhere
as if to frighten them away.
I realise that I should go around
shutting the doors and windows
and bring in the washing from the line,
but now there is a sudden, eerie coldness,
like the dip
before a great wave
catches and hurls you upwards.
~ David Brooks,#NFDB |
| 1164:Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not a green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won't. Gerry can die, and you won't. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been. ~ Fay Weldon, #NFDB |
| 1165:I realise I'll have to acquire the ability to speak to my audience in between numbers. I've never had to do that. On the street I only focus on the keyboard settings for my next song, which takes a bit of time and a lot of concentration. So I'll have to develop that new skill, which gives me pause, because I'm afraid I'll say something stupid and disillusion people when they realise I'm an ordinary earthling - in fact, as ordinary as anyone else on this planet. ~ Susan Schneider, #NFDB |
| 1166:She wondered when her daughter would realise that for the most part, people weren't that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: The wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, she thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future. While most older people believed that they lay in the past. ~ Laura Moriarty, #NFDB |
| 1167:if a temple, or a symbol, or an image helps you to realise the Divinity within, you are welcome to it. Have two hundred images if you like. If certain forms and formularies help you to realise the Divine, God speed you; have, by all means, whatever forms, and whatever temples, and whatever ceremonies you want to bring you nearer to God. But do not quarrel about them; the moment you quarrel, you are not going Godward, you are going backward, towards the brutes. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1168:If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB |
| 1169:In the film, Montagu makes a cameo appearance as an air vice marshal with doubts about the plan’s feasibility. At one point in the film, Montagu leans over to Webb, looks him in the eye, and declares: “I suppose you realise, Montagu, that, if the Germans see through this, it will pinpoint Sicily.” This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction. ~ Ben Macintyre, #NFDB |
| 1170:She wondered when her daughter would realise that for the most part, people weren't that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: The wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, she thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future. While most older people believed that they lay in the past. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB |
1171:Have you seen our friend Everard Bone at all?' Rocky called out.
Immediately he asked this, I realised that there had been a little nagging worry, an unhappiness, almost, at the back of my mind. Everard Bone and his meat. Of course it sounded ridiculous put like that and I decided that I would not mention it to Rocky. He would mock and not understand. It made me sad to realise that he would not understand, that perhaps he did not really understand anything about me. ~ Barbara Pym,#NFDB |
1172:Have you seen our friend Everard Bone at all?’ Rocky called out.
Immediately he asked this, I realised that there had been a little nagging worry, an unhappiness, almost, at the back of my mind. Everard Bone and his meat. Of course it sounded ridiculous put like that and I decided that I would not mention it to Rocky. He would mock and not understand. It made me sad to realise that he would not understand, that perhaps he did not really understand anything about me. ~ Barbara Pym,#NFDB |
| 1173:There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are. ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB |
| 1174:Realisation of love can never come so long as there is the least desire in the heart, or what Shri Ramakrishna used to say, attachment for Kâma-Kânchana (sense-pleasure and wealth). In the perfect realisation of love, even the consciousness of one's own body does not exist. Also, the supreme Jnana is to realise the oneness everywhere, to see one's own self as the Self in everything. That too cannot come so long as there is the least consciousness of the ego (Aham). ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1175:if you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it's unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realise that it's part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don't feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren't having the desired effect.' The danger lies in focusing on that pain, giving it a particular person's name, and keeping it always present in your thoughts. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 1176:There are those from religious backgrounds who resist and oppose LGBT equality; some very obsessively and publicly. They make bold accusations and negative statements about gay and lesbian people, their supposed "lifestyle" and relationships. But when a son, daughter, brother, sister or close friend comes out it is no longer an "issue" it becomes a person. They realise everything they'd said was painfully targeted at someone they love. Then......everything changes. ~ Anthony Venn Brown, #NFDB |
| 1177:There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB |
| 1178:You give them an environment where they feel they can grow. But also make bloody sure you challenge them. You make sure they realise learning is hard. Because if you don’t, if you only make it a safe haven, if it’s all clap-happy, and ‘everything the kids do is great’, then what are you creating? Emotional toffees, who’ve actually learnt nothing, but who then have to go back and face the real world … Find that balance, it stretches you, it stretches you as far as you’ll go. ~ David Hare, #NFDB |
| 1179:The filming was interrupted at one point by an old man walking his dog, looking for driftwood. Mallet asked him if he wouldn’t mind moving, and pointed out Bowie sitting outside the catering van. ‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked. Sharp as a tack, the old man responded with, ‘Of course I do. It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ Sometime later, Bowie remembered, ‘That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realise, “Yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit. ~ Dylan Jones, #NFDB |
| 1180:How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. ~ China Mi ville, #NFDB |
| 1181:They are now beginning to realise that even the most objective of their observations are steeped in the conventions they adopted at the outset and by forms or habits of thought developed in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man, #NFDB |
| 1182:I think there in a great deal to be said for religious education in the sense of teaching about religion and biblical literacy. Both those things, by the way, I suspect will prepare a child to give up religion. If you are taught comparative religion, you are more likely to realise that there are other religions than the one you have been brought up in. And if you are if you are taught to read the bible, I can think of almost nothing more calculated to turn you off religion. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB |
| 1183:younger sister Ranjana fell ill just before her Class 8 exams, he stayed by her side all night to read out to her from her books and notes. It was one of those moments when the Delhi chief minister became aware of his responsibilities. As dawn broke, Ranjana was up and ready to write her exams. "She somehow managed to write her papers the next day. She is a doctor now. I was the eldest (among siblings). But nobody made me realise my responsibilities. I don't know how this feeling ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 1184:At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races... More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class... People began to realise how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what is belied to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself. ~ Vasily Grossman, #NFDB |
| 1185:Numero uno: you realise pretty quickly that you're never going to get what one of the viler magazines might refer to as a 'bikini body' so, instead of doing a hundred sit-ups twice a day, you can opt out of all that perfectionist malarkey. And you can spend your energy developing other personal qualities. Like being funny. And galloping. And learning complex dance routines, which become suddenly hilarious when you whack on a leotard and try to perform them. All that lovely stuff. ~ Miranda Hart, #NFDB |
| 1186:They’re drunk now,” Guy said, “and optimistic, but they will soon be squabbling over household expenses and hoping they’ll find love later in the Meat Rack. They’ll be arguing. ‘Why did you buy that expensive leg of lamb?’ And they become especially cross at the beginning of September when they realise the season is over and they’ve danced their tushes off and fucked a lot in the bushes, but, hey, they haven’t bagged a beau for the winter and they’ve maxed out their credit cards. ~ Edmund White, #NFDB |
1187:Do you realise that about two hundred of Twing's heftiest are waiting for you outside to chuck you into the pond?"
"No!"
"Absolutely!"
For a moment the poor chap seemed crushed. But only for a moment. There has always been something of the good old English bulldog breed about Bingo. A strange, sweet smile flickered for an instant over his face.
"It's all right," he said. "I can sneak out through the cellar and climb over the wall at the back. They can't intimidate me! ~ P G Wodehouse,#NFDB |
| 1188:Individuality in universality is the plan of creation. Each cell has its part in bringing about consciousness. Man is individual and at the same time universal. It is while realising our individual nature that we realise even our national and universal nature. Each is an infinite circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. By practice one can feel universal Selfhood which is the essence of Hinduism. He who sees in every being his own Self is a Pandita (sage). ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1189:If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
| 1190:Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable. ~ Colin Thubron, #NFDB |
| 1191:The Scoutmaster guides the boy in the spirit of an older brother... He has simply to be a boy-man, that is: (1) He must have the boy spirit in him: and must be able to place himself in the right plane with his boys as a first step. (2) He must realise the needs, outlooks and desires of the different ages of boy life. (3) He must deal with the individual boy rather than with the mass. (4) He then needs to promote a corporate spirit among his individuals to gain the best results. ~ Robert Baden Powell, #NFDB |
| 1192:I didn’t want to be the kind of guy who had no regrets. Honestly, I wouldn’t trust someone who had no regrets. It means that they’ve never learned from their mistakes, or they’re too arrogant to realise they’ve made them in the first place … I think having regrets makes us better people … So…instead of having no regrets, we should know our regrets … Wear them like a bade of lessons learned … If we can’t recognise when we’ve messed up, then how will we know when we’ve gotten it right? ~ Priscilla Glenn, #NFDB |
| 1193:I realise its commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, "I love you, but i don't always like you." But what kind of love is that? it seems to me that comes down to, I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you ca still hurt my feelings - but i cant stand having you around." Who wants to be loved like that? I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, "I like you." I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn't more important. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB |
| 1194:Therefore, mathematically...there was no chance at all that [she] could have existed. A zero in ten-to-the-power-of-forever chance. And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realise why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So, if they believed in themselves - the logic must go - why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely? ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 1195:I would like to assist these beings who aren't aware that they are actually to assist nature so that they are able to fully realise themselves to be that which they are to become. Luckily for me I prepared the way for others who don't understand themselves by pushing past all limitations and standing up. I prepared the way for those who are not aware of what is to step forth in their lives as their purpose and who are unable to place themselves without forgetting what they are here to do. ~ Timothy Treadwell, #NFDB |
| 1196:Lewis also reflects his own conviction about the nature of children’s literature, that no book can be said to be good for children unless it is also good for adults: “This is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. … Only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true.” He ~ Diana Pavlac Glyer, #NFDB |
| 1197:By virtue of individual and collective human reflection, evolution— overflowing the physico-chemical organisation of bodies—turns back upon itself and thereby reinforces itself with a new organising power vastly concentric to the first—the cognitive organisation of the universe. To think ‘the world’ (as physics is beginning to realise) is not merely to register it but to cofer upon it a form of unity it would otherwise (i.e. without being thought) be without. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB |
1198:Ten things you should always do when you form a group
1. Work with your friends
2. Find like-minded people
3. Have ultimate self-belief
4. Write great songs
5. Get a great manager
6. Live in Manchester
7. Support each other through thick and thin
8. Realise no one person is bigger than the group (thanks to Gene Simmons for that one)
9. Watch where the money goes
10. Always get separate legal advice for everything before you sign; failing that, ask your mam and dad ~ Peter Hook,#NFDB |
| 1199:I believe that we, that this planet, hasn't seen its Golden Age. Everybody says its finished ... art's finished, rock and roll is dead, God is dead. Fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia, I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden, I wasn't there with Emperor Han, I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age ...if only each generation would realise that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB |
| 1200:It's just human nature - isn't it? - to be more attracted to something that's taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, 'Don't do drugs,' you wanna do drugs. That's why I've always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the fucking things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y'know? ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB |
| 1201:People do this a lot. They don't seem to realise that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materialises. But everything's not going to be made of leather, the world won't stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals - you'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB |
| 1202:What has been attained may again be lost. Only when you realise the true peace, the peace you have never lost, that peace will remain with you for it was never away. Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what is it that you have never lost. That which is there before the beginning and after the ending of everything, to That there is no birth nor death. That Immovable state, which is not affected by the birth and death of a body or a mind, that state you must perceive. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB |
| 1203:When I finished the juniors I felt, perhaps for about a year and a half, that everything was going to be the same and that I would be able to go out there and win any match. But it wasn't the case. I struggled. It took me time to adjust and to realise it was not going to happen like it did in the juniors. It was three years between the junior ranks and reaching the Australian Open, and even then, having reached the final against Hingis, I wasn't really realising what it would take to go higher. ~ Amelie Mauresmo, #NFDB |
| 1204:People do this a lot. They don't seem to realise that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materializes. But everything's not going to be made of leather, the world won't stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals -- you'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB |
| 1205:You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don't, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You're selfish and rigid and absorbed, you're like an infant. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB |
| 1206:In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage. In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time. [But you must know enough to realise this, lest you focus more on the defeat than finding the lesson you paid for with the defeat. With every defeat and mistake, you have the logical right to get excited about the future when you will understand and be able to apply the lessons and thereby turn defeat and temporary failure into victory and permanent success.] ~ Robert Collier, #NFDB |
| 1207:The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive. ~ Vanessa Redgrave, #NFDB |
| 1208:Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, a revolution and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came to realise during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany's plight. ~ Ian Kershaw, #NFDB |
| 1209:The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it...contingency is not an illusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness. Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself. When you realise that, it turns your stomach over and everything starts floating about...; that is the Nausea. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB |
| 1210:I’ve been told that I cannot change shit, so I might as well stop torturing myself. My emotions are ridiculed and branded as childish. I have been told that the world has given up on my people. I have been told, and realise that on many occasions, I myself am viewed as an outcast by some of those suffering. I’ve been confronted and my answer is always the same: I care even in my most fucked-up moments. I care even when gates of shit pour open to drown me; I care because I am a citizen of the world. ~ Asaad Almohammad, #NFDB |
| 1211:Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB |
| 1212:It’s just human nature – isn’t it? – to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the f**king things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know? ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB |
| 1213:Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB |
1214:It is always the little things that build up. Often there is no dramatic reason for discontent in marriages. It seeps in slowly over the years.
You don't even notice it creeping in. It happens, trickle by trickle.
You do not realise when or how the easy familiarity gets replaced by a 'taken-for-granted' attitude over the years. By the time you do, it is often late. Habits have been formed, patterns have been set. And a comfort-zone have been established.
A zone that is hard to get out of. ~ Preeti Shenoy,#NFDB |
| 1215:I sit and stare at him for a few long moments and notice that his hair is almost perfectly straight now, the curls that he had when we first met have gone, he’s wearing it longer again. When did it grow? When did his curls disappear? It’s a simple observation but one that makes me realise he’s changing and because he’s not with me, I’m not noticing, I’m not part of his everyday world, this boy who’s skin I have known as well as my own these past few years has grown and changed and he’s done it all without me ~ Lesley Jones, #NFDB |
| 1216:Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB |
| 1217:It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 1218:To live wakefully is to live in full awareness of this, our human situation. To live well is to reconcile ourselves to it, and try to realise whatever excellence we can. For this some economic conditions are more favorable than others. When the conception of work is removed from the scene of its execution, we are divided against one another, and each against himself. For thinking is inherently bound up with doing, and it is in rational activity together with others that we find our peculiar satisfaction. ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB |
| 1219:as an almost legendary figure. To his child she had always been presented as the beloved beauty of a golden age, a link with the great Victorians, a creature larger than life in power and importance, so that all through these last perturbing weeks Frances had comforted herself with the recollection that if the worse came to the worst, even though Meyrick himself was half across the world, there was always Gabrielle up at Hampstead. It was hard to realise now that the moment of appeal had come, that she was ~ Margery Allingham, #NFDB |
| 1220:The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life. ~ Bhagat Singh, #NFDB |
| 1221:Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens's creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race—I say it in all seriousness—than Cardinal Newman's Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it. ~ Stephen Leacock, #NFDB |
| 1222:It is very strange to realise that when you see those old films on television of the toothbrush moustache dictator ranting and the mass rallies, and the stiff-armed salutes and all the marching up and down, and the well-known flag standing to attention, that famous menace and what it would lead to - all of it was happening while people went on buying shoes and handbags and party dresses and gramophone records and ornaments and choosing a new car or a new wireless set, or just sitting in a café eating cream cakes. ~ Linda Grant, #NFDB |
| 1223:A better educational system should, therefore, be worked out which will present the possibilities of human living in such a manner that barriers will be broken down, prejudices removed, and a training given to the developing child which will enable him, when grownup, to live with other men in harmony and goodwill. This can be done, if patience and understanding are developed and if educators realise that "where there is no vision, the people perish". p. 87 ~ Alice Bailey in Education in the New Age, Lucis Trust Publishing (1954), #NFDB |
| 1224:It's humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation - a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB |
| 1225:I don't believe in the hero that sets out to climb a mountain and achieves it with no setbacks. I he does, he obviously didn't set his goals high enough and shouldn't even have anything to be proud of. He didn't challenge himself enough. He might have learned a thing or two, but the real lessons are taught when you're balancing on the very edge, with one foot over the cliff, everyone expecting you to fall. That's when you realise your potential. Or rather, how far away from your own potential you actually are. ~ Charlotte Eriksson, #NFDB |
| 1226:It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening. ~ Marina Fiorato, #NFDB |
| 1227:To understand a person, one needs to know the primordial wishes he or she longs to fulfill. Whether or not people's lives make sense to them depends on whether or how far they are able to realise these wishes. But they are not embedded in advance of all experience. They evolve from early childhood in life with other people, and are fixed gradually, over the years, in the form that will determine the course of life; sometimes, however, this will happen suddenly, in conjunction with an especially momentous experience. ~ Norbert Elias, #NFDB |
| 1228:Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realise that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different! Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him. He heard the prophecy and he leapt into action, with the result that he not only handpicked the man most likely to finish him, he handed him uniquely deadly weapons! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 1229:We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless. ~ Irvine Welsh, #NFDB |
| 1230:We sometimes fail to realise that when we pray to Allah we are in fact performing a great act of ibadah (worship). On the surface it might seem as if we are asking out of self-interest, but we are really proving the sincerity of our belief in the tauhid (Oneness) of Allah and our submission to the True God. Thus the Prophet pbuh said: "Supplication is itself the worship." (Reported by Abu Daud and al-Tirmizi, sahih.) If a servant prays the whole night to Allah, he therefore performs a great ibadah all night long. ~ Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, #NFDB |
| 1231:And I know when you’re a teenager everybody feels different and alien to the other people around them but there seems to be an added dimension when you’re queer. It’s because for that period of time you’re more isolated than anybody else and you truly think you are the only one of your kind. So you create fantastic barriers and defence strategies for yourself to survive. And when you get older and realise that you can take them down it’s an internal and eternal struggle to do so. Fear is the best anti-motivator in the world. ~ Sean Kennedy, #NFDB |
| 1232:his growling by coughing with the effort. It was, after all, very early for him. ‘Do you realise I just about keep that place afloat? There are not one but two champagne cocktails named after me.’ ‘Well, I haven’t seen the papers yet myself, but if you look in this morning’s Daily Mail,’ I said serenely, ‘you will see a story in the gossip column thing, all about how Prince Nicolas of Hollenberg has been banned from the notorious society—’ ‘The Daily Mail?’ demanded Nicky. ‘Hang on, there’s a copy here.’ I heard scrabbling. ~ Hester Browne, #NFDB |
| 1233:My doctrine means that I must identify myself with life, with everything that lives, that I must share the majesty of life in the presence of God. The sum-total of this life is God. .. Man is not at peace with himself until he has become like unto God. The endeavor to reach this state is the supreme, the only ambition worth having. And this is self-realisation. This self-realisation is the subject of the Gita, as it is of all scriptures... to be a real devotee is to realise oneself. Self-realisation is not something apart. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB |
1234:Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same thing as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine...The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered.
What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life...There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. ~ Jeanette Winterson,#NFDB |
1235:Humble myself? 'Fore Gad, you must be mad!"
"Belike I am; but I tell you Tracy, that if your passion is love, 'tis a strange one that puts yourself first. I would not give a snap of a finger for it! You want this girl, not for her happiness, but for your own pleasure. That is not the love I once told you would save you from yourself. When it comes, you will count yourself as naught; you will realise your own insignificance, and above all, be ready to make any sacrifice for her sake. Yes, even to the point of losing her! ~ Georgette Heyer,#NFDB |
| 1236:Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway. ~ Oliver Burkeman, #NFDB |
| 1237:I always think of books being tougher in a sense, in that you’ve got to sit down and you’ve got to do a little bit of work, but the rewards are so great. When a book opens up to you, it is you and that book, and there’s something really special about that - that you’re reading words and you go beyond the mechanics of words and turning pages. It’s always that nice thing when you’re turning pages and you don’t even realise it. That’s what I’ve always loved about books and that’s why I think they’ll never disappear from our lives. ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB |
1238:Divine Mother, I want to realise Your Presence in all the parts of my being, penetrating even the body - only I don't know how to do it. You are the very reason of my being; why then do I live now without feeling Your Presence even in the cells of my body?
The physical nature is obscure and recalcitrant everywhere; it is very difficult for it to become conscious of the divine Presence. That is why we must be patient and keep on aspiring with the certitude of Victory. My blessings are always with you.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB |
1239:Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life love knocks our doors, enters our lives & changes it forever. You start believing in dreams, you start making wishes & you start to trust your heart even more! That love holds your hands & makes you feel you are safer than ever; that love makes you believe that nothing can go wrong now; and oh that warm hug, which makes you want to spend your entire life then & there!
That’s when you realise you are not living an ordinary life, but it’s a fairytale! ~ Anamika Mishra,#NFDB |
| 1240:He laughingly expressed his surprise at having provoked such anger. Perhaps he said this in the hope of minimising in my eyes the importance of his indiscreet intervention, perhaps because he was of a cowardly nature and lived gaily and idly in an atmosphere of falsehood, as jellyfish float upon the surface of the sea, perhaps because, even if he had been a man of a different kind, other people can never see things from our point of view and therefore do not realise the magnitude of the injury that words uttered at random can do us. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 1241:Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB |
| 1242:‗In life, at sometime or another we come to a point where all relationships cease—where there is only us and Allah. There are no parents, brother or sister, or any friend. Then we realise that there is no earth under us nor is there sky above, but only Allah who is supporting us in this emptiness. Then we realise our worth – it is not more than a grain of sand or the leaf of a plant. Then we realise our existence is only confined to our being. Our demise makes not a whit of difference to the world around us, nor to the scheme of things. ~ Umera Ahmed, #NFDB |
| 1243:The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. ~ Wilkie Collins, #NFDB |
| 1244:She cannot remember her mother's face... This is the woman who brought her into the world... This is the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind's eye in her mother's direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders... She begins to realise how alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white space between the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB |
1245:Difficulties are sent to us exclusively to make the realisation more perfect. Each time we try to realise something and meet with a resistance or an obstacle or even a failure - what seems to be a failure - we should know, we should never forget that it is exclusively, absolutely, so that the realisation may be more perfect. So this habit of cringing, of getting discouraged or even of feeling uncomfortable, or of abusing yourself and telling yourself: There! Again I have made a mistake - all that is absolute foolishness.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB |
1246:Talk 10.
A visitor asked how to realise oneself in accordance with Maharshi's instructions, contained in his text of Truth Revealed, verse 9, supplement. The difficulty was in controlling the mind.
M.: It is to be done by controlling the breath. If you practise it by yourself without other help, then the mind is controlled. Otherwise the mind comes under control spontaneously in the presence of a superior power. Such is the greatness of association with the wise (satsanga). ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramanasramam,#NFDB |
| 1247:The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.” The spirit of Bugs Bunny inspires the finale of Yossarian’s adventures with 256th Squadron. It’s the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed. But here, finally, he can become free. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB |
| 1248:Mathematical study and research are very suggestive of mountaineering. Whymper made several efforts before he climbed the Matterhorn in the 1860's and even then it cost the life of four of his party. Now, however, any tourist can be hauled up for a small cost, and perhaps does not appreciate the difficulty of the original ascent. So in mathematics, it may be found hard to realise the great initial difficulty of making a little step which now seems so natural and obvious, and it may not be surprising if such a step has been found and lost again. ~ Louis J Mordell, #NFDB |
| 1249:The thing I realised instantly was that at first, Wag had blamed all of this on luck. But he'd made that luck happen. He just hadn't realised it. He'd made a series of 'correct' choices, which had let him, bass in hand, to his girl. Maybe we can all do that. Maybe we can all change our fortunes. Maybe there's no such thing as destiny - there's just a series of choices we create ourselves. I guess it's only when we look at how a No could have changed our lives for the worse that we realise the value of the tiny yeses that fly at us each day. - 293 ~ Danny Wallace, #NFDB |
| 1250:Diary of a Country Priest: So I said to myself that people are consumed by boredom. Naturally, one has to ponder for a while to realise this – one does not see it immediately. It is a like some sort of dust. One comes and goes without seeing it, one breathes it in, one eats it, one drinks it, and it is so fine that it doesn’t even scrunch between one’s teeth. But if one stops up for a moment, it settles like a blanket over the face and hands. One has to constantly shake this ash-rain off one. That is why people are so restless.7 It ~ Lars Fredrik H ndler Svendsen, #NFDB |
| 1251:Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost. Over time, you begin to develop a mental map, a collection of favoured destinations and preferred routes: a labyrinth no other person could ever precisely duplicate or reproduce. What I was building in those years, and what now follows, is a map of loneliness, built out of both need and interest, pieced together from my own experiences and those of others. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB |
| 1252:The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life.— from Bhagat Singh's prison diary, p. 124 ~ Bhagat Singh, #NFDB |
| 1253:When I recall my teachers at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! . . . I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages - though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB |
| 1254:One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity. ~ Daniel Tammet, #NFDB |
| 1255:Alex's T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it's a trick of the light, but then I realise he's drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides.....The helicopter has him fixed in it's spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don't think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB |
| 1256:This life is only a passing flicker of the flame, a shadow. You will cast it off and soar to a new plane, a new level of understanding, where you will realise that what you perceive now as reality is no more than a prison of the senses. You will look, and it will be as if you see with the eyes of the maker. You are within creation. Creation is within you. You are an aspect of the first breath that made the universe, your body is made of the dust of bodies that have gone before, and when you die, your body and your deeds give life. You, yourself, are God. ~ Claire North, #NFDB |
| 1257:A human being can only train for death by leading a life that is morally good; that is—to desire nothing too much; to be content with what one has; to be entirely self-sufficient within oneself, so that whatever one loses, one will still be able to carry on regardless; to do none harm; to realise that it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one; to accept that life is a loan given by Nature without a due date and that repayment may be demanded at any time; that the most tragic character in the world is a tyrant who has broken all these precepts. ~ Robert Harris, #NFDB |
| 1258:I think sometimes when people get older they start to limit themselves and think that if they wanted to start singing or they wanted to start playing guitar or if they wanted to, I don't know...become an archeologist - whatever it is, they think they just can't do it anymore because they've hit a certain age and I just think that's like putting yourself in jail. I realised a couple of years ago that the more that I did and made things and created things that I could love; it helped me to realise that I was actually loving myself and what came out of me. ~ Theresa Wayman, #NFDB |
| 1259: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! ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB |
| 1260:It’s abundantly clear that these events do happen, and quite frequently, but often it’s been difficult to identify exactly how a tumour suppressor has mutated. In the last fifteen years, we’ve started to realise that there is another way that a tumour suppressor gene can become inactivated. The gene may be silenced epigenetically. If the DNA at the promoter becomes excessively methylated or the histones are covered in repressive modifications, the tumour suppressor will be switched off. The gene has been inactivated without changing the underlying blueprint. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB |
1261:I don't have Ryan," she pointed out.
Rachael stopped them both and looked at her. "What are you talking about? You've always had Ryan."
"I haven't. The Army has."
"Fin." Exhaling irritably, Rachael looked away for a moment before meeting her eyes. "You're his heart. You. That's his sacrifice for whatever demons he's carrying around inside him. But he needs to wake up and realise that it doesn't matter where he is, or what he does, you'll still make being together work , because both of you share something that is so far beyond love it won't ever die. ~ Kate McCarthy,#NFDB |
1262:How should a prospective writer go about becoming an author?
First of all, realise that it's very hard, and that writing is a grueling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start out writing for radio. It's still a relatively easy medium to get into because it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much on the imagination. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB |
| 1263:When you have a baby you start thinking of death cuz' you see the opposite of life. I've calmed down now but for the first or two years, I kept thinking: "Oh my God, if I die what's going to happen to the child?" And you realise how vulnerable they are, but how critical your own life is because they're so dependent on you. You do feel your own mortality. I kept saying to myself: "OK, when they're 18, I'll be 'x'; so if they get married at 30, I'll be'x'will I get to see grandchildren?" So, since they've been born I've been thinking about death the whole time. ~ Gurinder Chadha, #NFDB |
| 1264:Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare's run, the hawk's high gyres : such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise that live by voices inaudible to you. ~ Robert Macfarlane, #NFDB |
| 1265:We will always ask ourselves the same questions. We will always need to be humble enough to accept that our heart knows why we are here. Yes, it’s difficult to talk to your heart, and perhaps it isn’t even necessary. We simply have to trust and follow the signs and live our Personal Legend; sooner or later, we will realise that we are all part of something, even if we can’t understand rationally what that something is. They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence and out of that moment Heaven or Hell is born. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB |
| 1266:Let go of your constant strife to sustain and assert the idea of who you are. It is this massive effort of defining your identity that keeps you wedged in the chronic routine of comparisons and conflicts with whoever and whatever appears to threaten this idea. If you have tried to assert yourself for many years and you have accomplished nothing, then be honest and do something different. Just be nothing. Try it for one day. Release your idea of being yourself, and just be nothing, be the void. And as you are being nothing you may realise that you can be all that is ~ Franco Santoro, #NFDB |
| 1267:What I've grown to hate in my 'old age' is shouting directors. I find anybody who screams and shouts to be difficult to work with... especially because the people who scream and shout tend to do it at runners, and not at the main actors. They make a great amount of noise and it's often at someone who is an easy target. I love working with people who are calm, even if my role is peripheral. I like people who realise that this is just a film... that we're not going over the top in No Man's land and screaming for our lives. There's just nothing to be gained by volume. ~ Miranda Raison, #NFDB |
| 1268:It isn't possible to kill part of your “self” unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch it is not explained. You ought to realise that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordinary murder. Only it is yourself that has been killed. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB |
| 1269:nodded. With most people, almost everyone, there’s some level at which enough is enough. The level varies from one person to another, but there is a level. You didn’t have to spend long in Rust’s company to realise that he had no threshold. He would escalate any situation with startling rapidity to the point where he could count it as a victory, which meant the other party had to lose. His wasn’t a personality built to last. At least, not in a society with laws and police to enforce them. But he would make quite a mess before he was finished. I was pretty sure of that! ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB |
| 1270:I'm actually cautiously optimistic that Donald Trump will be so bad that he will force America to wake up and realise that forcing America to vote for right wing Republicans is always a terrible idea. It's never been a good idea, but what happened here is you have a president like Obama who gives you eight years of relative stability and prosperity, and people forget that Republicans are just terrible, not just for the country but for the planet. Maybe this is America's equivalent of bottoming out, like a crystal meth addict going on one last big run before they have to get sober. ~ Moby, #NFDB |
| 1271:Things are so busy and so quick, and there’s so much going on, you have to realise the time when you have to take a step back, take a breath and really think back to where you come from. I’m from a very, very rural place. There’s really nobody out there, just roads and farms. I had a long transition to get to where I am now. I moved away when I was young, when I was about 19. I’d literally come from an area with dirt roads and stuff like that, right to the centre of a city of about five million people. It’s been great. I’m based in New York and every day it's amazing. ~ Diego Klattenhoff, #NFDB |
| 1272:We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy. ~ Ir ne N mirovsky, #NFDB |
| 1273:Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right! ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB |
1274:We will always ask ourselves the same questions ....We will always need to be humble enough to accept that our heart knows why we are here.... Yes, it’s difficult to talk to your heart and perhaps it isn’t even necessary
We simply have to trust and follow the signs and live our Personal Legend;
sooner or later, we will realise that we are all part of something, even if we can’t understand rationally what that something is.
They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for existence and out of that moment Heaven or Hell is born. ... ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB |
| 1275:People save their strong opinions for women. Why don’t they look at men? If I have to read another book or see another movie about a woman being courageous, I’ll throw up. Where are the books and movies about the men who do this stuff? But no, it’s always about the women. They not only have to get through it, they’re supposed to stand up, become a symbol, allow their whole lives to become derailed and defined by it. What if you don’t want to? People bang on about women having the right to make choices—well, they need to realise women have the right to choose in these matters, too. ~ Kirsty Eagar, #NFDB |
| 1276:Through experiments over the past few decades physicists have discovered matter to be completely mutable into other particles or energy and vice-versa and on a subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty in definite places, but rather shows 'tendencies' to exist. Quantum physics is beginning to realise that the Universe appears to be a dynamic web of interconnected and inseparable energy patterns. If the universe is indeed composed of such a web, there is logically no such thing as a part. This implies we are not separated parts of a whole but rather we are the Whole. ~ Barbara Brennan, #NFDB |
1277:I often remember in this false, distorted way, and the memories are often cloaked in the colour of the sun. Sometimes I feel nostalgia for things I knew I hated when they were happening, for days spent at the beach or the swimming pool with my sisters.
When I pick my memories apart, I realise my mind has merely played back the objective ingredients, the clichéd apparatus of happiness, the sun, the sound of splashing water, ice-cream on parched lips and cold fizzy drink on a hot tongue, and laugher too. My memory often peddles on the falsehood of past happiness. I should know this. ~ M J Hyland,#NFDB |
| 1278:Our modern Western culture only recognises the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constituitions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people's freedom to realise their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires. ~ Ajahn Brahm, #NFDB |
| 1279:That which rises and sinks is made up of what it rises from. The finality of the universe is the God Arunachala. Meditating on Him or on the seer, the Self, there is a mental vibration 'I' to which all are reduced. Tracing the source of 'I', the primal 'I-I' alone remains over, and it is inexpressible. The seat of Realisation is within and the seeker cannot find it as an object outside him. That seat is bliss and is the core of all beings. Hence it is called the Heart. The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realise it. There is nothing else to do. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB |
| 1280:All knowledge must stand on perception of certain facts, and upon that we have to build our reasoning. But, curiously enough the vast majority of mankind think, especially at the present time, that no such perception is possible in religion, that religion can only be apprehended by vain arguments. Therefore we are told not to disturb the mind by vain arguments. Religion is a question of fact, not of talk. We have to analyse our own souls and to find what is there. We have to understand it and to realise what is understood. That is religion. No amount of talk will make religion. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1281:Perhaps there can be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look, 'Do we need tea? she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury...' She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. I mumbled something about making a joke and that of course one needed tea always, at every hour of the day or night. ~ Barbara Pym, #NFDB |
| 1282:He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot. ~ Hanif Kureishi, #NFDB |
| 1283:The turning points in life, the really important decisions, are rarely dramatic. The first time someone tries heroin isn’t life-altering, but the three-hundredth time, the time their heart stops, sure is. Every human is an unwieldy vessel, weighed down with hopes and dreams. We turn so slowly that we don’t even realise we are moving at all. We creatures of habit, our momentum is all-consuming. For every action there are consequences we could never anticipate; it’s how we grow, each of us, from worms into butterflies, flapping our wings and making tornadoes on the other side of the world. ~ Liam Pieper, #NFDB |
| 1284:When we moderns are told that God is not a mere word to be argued and debated about but a state of consciousness we can realise here and now in the flesh, we raise our eyebrows; when some spiritual Seer quietly tells us that there are God-knowing men living among us now, we significantly tap our foreheads. When, further, we are assured that we bear the divine within our breasts and that divinity constitutes our true selfhood, we smile in a superior way. Yet this is not theory nor is it sentiment; it is an open and patent fact to people who have gone some way in spiritual percipiency. Before ~ Paul Brunton, #NFDB |
| 1285:Rahul did not realise the fluttering of the pigeons that so often disturbed everyone in the lab, by darting in and out of the ventilators. He did not realise the long, loud bell that went off, signalling the end of the last lecture, nor did she! They were living in the same moment, the same time, the same feeling, the same thought. Everything had slowed down to that moment. It was as if everything had stopped and all that existed were two people bound to each other by a string of feelings, two young people finally realising what life really meant and what they were supposed to do – love as one! ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB |
1286:There's a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his.
As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won't have to feel this.
It's a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.
He takes small steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people. ~ Claire Keegan,#NFDB |
| 1287:We should consider interthinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realise new possibilities for evolving life on this planet. Accordingly, we should endeavour to equip it with the mechanisms necessary for the proper fulfilment of its task—the psychosocial equivalents of sense-organs, effector organs, and a co-ordinating central nervous system with dominant brain; and our aim should be the gradual personalisation of the human unit of evolution—its conversion, on the new level of co-operative interthinking, into the equivalent of a person. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB |
| 1288:This is our awakening to the Feminine, if we will take it. It shows us that the hero’s journey is not our journey. Ours is the heroine’s journey, a spiral journey of inner and outer discovery of our innermost selves and our source of Feminine power. We travel inwards, into dark and unknown terrains, finding our way through to the other side by discovering an inner flame to light our way. As we travel further on we realise that this inner flame is the goal we have been seeking, the guide and ourselves are one and the same, and furthermore the light and the darkness are two parts of the same whole. ~ Lucy H Pearce, #NFDB |
| 1289:It's like they say about soldiers coming back from war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week's chemotherapy and you're in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week's up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything's normal and familiar. It's too much. You think - one world can't possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you're going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to. ~ Steven Hall, #NFDB |
| 1290:Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Other again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. ~ Sadegh Hedayat, #NFDB |
| 1291:Life as it proceeds reveals, cooly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. ~ Sadegh Hedayat, #NFDB |
| 1292:Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope fo passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. ~ Sadegh Hedayat, #NFDB |
| 1293:Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. these are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. ~ Sadegh Hedayat, #NFDB |
1294:Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest, smearing mud upon his lapel, his tie, the starched immaculate white of his shirt.
I stared at him. So did Julian, and Francis, and the twins, with a kind of shocked horror. He seemed not to realise he had done anything out of the ordinary. He stood there perfectly still, the wind ruffling his hair and the dull light glinting from the rims of his glasses. ~ Donna Tartt,#NFDB |
1295:You are not my business partner,' Nephenia told Ishak. 'You're my familiar. It's an ancient and time-honoured pairing of two souls, not some shallow business transaction.'
The hyena yapped at her for several seconds, then Nephenia punched me in the arm. 'Ow! What was that for?'
'For letting your squirrel cat introduce these ruinous ideas into my familiar's head about "partnerships" and "equitable relationships". Do you realise Ishak's now telling me he wants us to work out a formal contract?'
'Wait until she hears about the clause on freshly killed meat,' Reichis whispered into my ear. ~ Sebastien de Castell,#NFDB |
| 1296:The new-born child does not realise that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body. And experiences of the same kind are necessary for the individual to become conscious of himself; but here there is the difference that, although everyone becomes equally conscious of his body as a separate and complete organism, everyone does not become equally conscious of himself as a complete and separate personality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 1297:By 1948 I was safe on my feet and able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to feel I should go crazy if I didn’t get away from it to England again, where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago. What I didn’t realise then was that it wasn’t England I was really fretting for. It was my lost youth. ~ Nevil Shute, #NFDB |
1298:In the aftermath, she (Misty) still felt as though she were floating and as Leone shifted back from her she leant over him, silver-grey eyes bright with emotion, and whispered, ‘I died and went to heaven the day I found you.’
A wolfish grin of appreciation slashed his wide, sensual mouth.
‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right? You don’t sound at all like yourself.’
‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ she advised, happiness flooding through her as he curved her close and pressed a slow, sweet kiss to her reddened mouth.
‘I didn’t realise I’d found heaven until I stumbled into hell,’ Leone traded feelingly. ~ Lynne Graham,#NFDB |
| 1299:But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phèdre and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
| 1300:Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don’t even realise that what you’re choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won’t pan out till you’re sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB |
| 1301:Callum tells me he loves me dozens of times a day, but he doesn’t need to. Even if he was mute, I’d still get the message loud and clear, because his eyes and his hands and his kisses say it. The fact that he is still here says it. When he wordlessly chops peas in half so I can swallow them, I know he loves me. When I see him pretending to remake the bed for the fifth time when I go into the en suite to pee, I know he loves me. When I realise he’s cluttered up my bathroom floor with improvised floor mats—again—so that I don’t slip, even though it’s driving me completely insane to be babied like that—I know he loves me. ~ Kelly Rimmer, #NFDB |
| 1302:Good books are rare, and to have a really good library, a few shelves are all we need. When I was still on my campus in India, I was convinced, like many professors, that if the Lord was to be found anywhere, it was in the lower stacks of the library. But now - just as when I go into a big department store, I can say, "How many things I don't need! How many expensive suits I don't want!" - when I enter a big library I say, "What tomes I don't have to read again! What folios I will never open!" This feeling of freedom will come to all of us when we realise, in the depths of our meditation, that all wisdom lies within. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #NFDB |
| 1303:In this chapter you may have noticed and perhaps even been irritated by the inconsistent spelling of realise and realize. It’s not a mistake but a subtle gesture to surface a delicate point. Different isn’t wrong. I am British and American, and this book will be read in many countries, so neither spelling is right or wrong. When in doubt, we’re told to pick one and be consistent. But why? Is it to maintain the illusion there’s one right way? Is it because diversity is inefficient? I invite you to ask if some irregularities that irritate may also inform. Why do they cause anger? What do you fear? What might they teach? ~ Peter Morville, #NFDB |
| 1304:Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB |
1305:What if you could meet your soul mate?" the ghost asked. "You 'd want to avoid that?"
"Hell, yes. The idea that there's one soul out there, waiting to merge with mine like some data-sharing program, depresses the hell out of me."
"It's not like that. It's not about losing yourself."
"Then what is it?" Alex was only half listening, still occupied with the viselike tightness of his chest.
"It's like your whole life you 've been falling toward the earth, until the moment someone catches you. And you realise that somehow you 've caught her at the same time. And together, instead of falling, you might be able to fly. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB |
1306:As I realise that I am going to be intersex my whole life. Years and years and decades, maybe for seventy years, I’ll be like this. And, unless I find someone who doesn’t mind having sex with me, I’m going to be alone all that time. I’ll probably be alone all that time. Think. How difficult it is for people to find someone they love, who likes the same things as them, who has the same values, who wants the same things out of life, and then imagine adding to that the fact that they not only have to be OK with having sex with a hermaphrodite, they have to like it.
Without being a totally weird pervert, I add to myself. ~ Abigail Tarttelin,#NFDB |
| 1307:Often when we connect with our values, we realise that we’ve been neglecting them for a long time and this can be very painful. But remember, this is not an excuse to beat yourself up! (‘What a hypocrite I am! I say I value doing all these different things, yet I’m not doing any of them! I’m pathetic!’) All of us lose touch with our values from time to time. Dwelling on those times is pointless because there’s nothing we can do to change the past. What’s important is to connect with our values here and now and to use them to guide and motivate our current actions. So if your mind does start beating up on you, simply thank it. ~ Russ Harris, #NFDB |
| 1308:whatever you intend to do, don’t waste it, lad. You’ve only got one life. But, you know, you never realise this until you are halfway through it, that’s if you get the chance to reach that stage. Often life is taken from people before they realise that they value it. I used to be always sorry when I heard of life being snatched from the young. But then again, it might have been better that way for them, for it may have saved them suppin’ sorrow. You know, Joseph, I’m a very healthy woman. I’ve never known a day’s illness in me life and yet I’ve known such unhappiness that at times I would have swapped it for the peace which ~ Catherine Cookson, #NFDB |
| 1309:A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
1310:I don't want you forgetting how different our circumstaces are. If you die, and I live, there's no life for me at all back in District Twelve. You're my whole life." Peeta says. "I would never be happy again. It's different for you. I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard. But there are other people who'd make your life worth living."
"No one really needs me," he says, and there's no selfpity in his voice. It's true his family doesn't need him. They will mourn him, as will a handfull of friends. But they will get on.... I realise only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me.
"I do," I say. "I need you. ~ Suzanne Collins,#NFDB |
| 1311:Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers?” QiRia looked at her. “In my head, of course.” He looked away. “There are not so many of those, anyway,” he said, voice a little quieter. “Loving becomes harder, the longer you live, and I have lived a very long time indeed.” He fixed his gaze on her again. “I’m sure it varies across species – some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all – but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the… expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB |
| 1312:There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort. C. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
| 1313:They don’t realise that they have failed to begin with by not having any Goals. 3. Fear of success—A low self-image or fear of having to live up to their success causes some people to fear success. 4. A lack of ambition. Our limited thinking prevents us from progress. There was a fisherman who, every time he caught a big fish, would throw it back into the river, keeping only the smaller ones. A man watching this unusual behavior asked the fisherman why he was doing this. The fisherman replied, “Because I have a small frying pan.” Most people never make it big in life because they are carrying a small frying pan. That is limited thinking. ~ Shiv Khera, #NFDB |
1314:It was cruel," said Dumbledore softly, "that you and Sirius had such a short time together. A brutal ending to what should have been a long and happy relationship."
Harry nodded, his eyes fixed resolutely on the spider now climbing Dumbledore's hat. He could tell that Dumbledore understood, that he might even suspect that until his letter arrived Harry had spent nearly all his time at the Dursleys' lying on his bed, refusing meals and staring at the misted window, full of the chill emptiness that he had come to associate with the Dementors.
"It's just hard," Harry said finally, in a low voice, "to realise he won't write to me again. ~ J K Rowling,#NFDB |
| 1315:Sandra has lived largely in stealth since the early 1980s. I didn't realise it at the time, but it was singular that halfway through our first interview she told me - a stranger still - that she had been assigned male at birth. I didn't know then why she chose to be that candid with me that early; maybe I was lucky enough to ask the right questions in the right way at the right time. But knowing her now, I suspect it had less to do with me personally and more to do with the fact that I crossed paths with her at the point in her life when she was, finally, bursting at the seams with her story, with the need to tell and be truly known. ~ Sarah Krasnostein, #NFDB |
| 1316:The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB |
| 1317:But here it is, Wanda Landowska is giving a concert at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday. And a delightful programme, delightful, Bach and Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin. A muddle but delightful. And all that harpsichord music is so interesting historically. Oh, Mary, and you too, Rose, you must hear her. After you have heard her play the pieces you have only heard on the piano, you will realise that quite a number of composers have been prophets, they have frequently written compositions which could not be properly performed, could not be fully realised, on the only instruments then existing, they were never truly heard till the piano was invented. ~ Rebecca West, #NFDB |
| 1318:He finds his way up the side of my neck, biting me just a little, moving lightly back and forth, like he's searching for a special spot. When he finds it, I make small sound I've never heard myself make before, like a gasp. He traces his tongue in slow circles around that spot. I realise my hands are just lying in my lap, doing nothing. I concentrate on lifting my arm and reaching for his face, but he catches my hand and holds it tightly at the wrist. His lips leave the spot and find their way back to my mouth, which is waiting, hoping for his return. He plants a gentle kiss on my lower lip and then whispers in my ear, "I just got lucky, Rose. ~ Louise Rozett, #NFDB |
| 1319:This is precisely why I loathed being a teacher! Young people are so infernally convinced that they are absolutely right about everything. Has it not occurred to you, my poor puffed-up poppinjay, that there might be an excellent reason why the Headmaster of Hogwarts is not confiding every tiny detail of his plans to you? Have you never paused, while feeling hard-done-by, to note that following Dumbledore's orders has never yet led you into harm? No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognise danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise what the Dark Lord may be planning. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
| 1320:Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context. ~ Douglas Murray, #NFDB |
1321:It is all right for the mayflies. It is all right if you know you only have another thirty or forty years. You can afford to think small. You can find it easy to imagine that you are a fixed thing, inside a fixed nation, with a fixed flag, and a fixed outlook. You can imagine that these things mean something.
The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human being. ~ Matt Haig,#NFDB |
| 1322:The younger generation often finds itself at odds with the older generation, and no era is without its generational divides and conflicts. This is true of us living in the present as it has been throughout human history, and there is nothing to suggest that things will change in the future. Perhaps it is human nature after all, for the young to stand above the old and to pronounce their judgment on the past on the way things were, dreaming aloud of how things should be otherwise- until, of course, the time comes when age makes us wiser and more humane, and we come to realise that one day we too will be judged by the restless heralds of the coming age. ~ Farish A Noor, #NFDB |
| 1323:If one religion true, then all the others also must be true. Thus the Hindu faith is yours as much as mine." And again, in amplification of the same idea: "We Hindus do not merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the cross of the Christian. We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite. So we gather all these flowers, and, binding them together with the cord of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship." To ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
1324:(Segura) "...surely you realise there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement. ... Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class."
(Wormold) "Who does?"
(Segura) "The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides.... ~ Graham Greene,#NFDB |
| 1325:I used to be a girl who believed in fairy tales. You know, the whole knight in shining armour riding in on a white horse that would lead me to my happily-ever-after. About eight months ago I lost hope and faith that I would ever find my prince, or to be more exact, that my prince would ever realise I was the one for him as he tried out all the other princesses. But what I discovered was that I was in the wrong damn fairytale the whole time, chasing the wrong damn prince. There' a Psyche for every Eros, an Elizabeth for every Darcy, an Abby for every Travis. And I only hope you still want me to be the Angel to your Rat. All along I was wearing the wrong wings. ~ Erin Noelle, #NFDB |
1326:Now, consider this.
A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet. ~ Matt Haig,#NFDB |
| 1327:I must admit here with a sense of guilt that I was called upon for the second time to subvert the loyalty of a section of the UDF members of the Nagaland legislature. My targets included a Sema and a few non-Angami MLAs. I did whatever I could do to ‘motivate` them to defect to the NNO at the behest of the masters in Delhi. That was my second tryst with blatant unlawful activities. By that time I had come to realise that intelligence machineries are blatantly used for promoting political interests. Agencies like IB are not mere tools of safeguarding the security of the country. They are required to serve the narrow political interest of the ruling elite. ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar, #NFDB |
| 1328:A man sleeps through most of his life, even when awake. You get so little time, yet still you spend it utterly oblivious. Angry, frustrated, fixated on meaningless nothings. That drawer does not close flush with the front of my desk. What cards does my opponent hold, and how much money can I win from him? I wish I were taller. What will I have for dinner, for I am not fond of parsnips?’ Shenkt rolled a mangled corpse out of his way with the toe of one boot. ‘It takes a moment like this to jerk us to our senses, to draw our eyes from the mud to the heavens, to root our attention in the present. Now you realise how precious is each moment. That is my gift to you. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB |
| 1329:Silently, slowly, Audra retreated the way she'd come until her backside met something that shouldn't have been there. Shit. Luckily, the chef emitted a groan that drowned out the sound of her squeak. She squeezed past Jay, shaking her head, but he grinned and started forward. "Oh, sorry, I didn't realise this place had an onsite brothel. I thought this was the kitchen," Jay boomed and Audra clapped both hands over her mouth so she wouldn't burst out laughing. The sounds of choking, coughing and frantic zipping only made it worse. "I hope you didn't pay too much for that one. She didn't even swallow. I'd ask for my money back, if I was you." He raised his voice. ~ Demelza Carlton, #NFDB |
| 1330:There are people out there who have x-ray vision. They can see through my walls, armor and scrims and filters right down to the real me. And the saddest thing in the world? I haven't forgotten who that person is. She's on there and waiting. Like sleeping beauty locked high in a tower, she's been patient and aware of the coma I've been in all these years. I realise the one hitch in having x-ray glasses is that I'm utterly exposed to him. It's one thing to want someone to keep looking, to swim over moats and dodge flaming arrows to find you. It's quite another when you ask yourself, really ask yourself, if you're finally ready to come out into the open. No matter what. ~ Liza Palmer, #NFDB |
1331:The Importance of Receiving
Receiving often is harder than giving. Giving is very important: giving insight, giving hope, giving courage, giving advice, giving support, giving money, and, most of all, giving ourselves. Without giving there is no brotherhood and sisterhood.
But receiving is just as important, because by receiving we reveal to the givers that they have gifts to offer. When we say, "Thank you, you gave me hope; thank you, you gave me a reason to live; thank you, you allowed me to realise my dream," we make givers aware of their unique and precious gifts. Sometimes it is only in the eyes of the receivers that givers discover their gifts. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,#NFDB |
| 1332:Now, I'm not going to deny that I was aware of your beauty. But the point is, this has nothing to do with your beauty. As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn't understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life. I knew it was hopeless, but that didn't matter to me. And it's not that I want to have you. All I want is to deserve you. Tell me what to do. Show me how to behave. I'll do anything you say. ~ Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, #NFDB |
1333:He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it.
“Will,” she whispered. “Say something, Will.”
But there was nothing to say. There was only emptiness, as there had been before her. As there would always be.
'I have lost everything', Will thought. 'Everything. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB |
| 1334:I'm thinking we ought to rethink the whole self-esteem thing. It should almost be a dirty word. I mean, look at Kayla. She has the intelligence of a tree stump, and its sense of humour. She's less about real attractiveness than she is about advertising... She's the kind of girl who shows how hot she is because she has nothing else to offer, who doesn't realise that hotness has an expiration date. Yet, I'm still a little nervous talking to her like she's holding a lottery ticket she just might or might not decide to hand over to me. It is nuts, if you stop to think about it. I give give her this power, and it's kind of like voting some idiot into office. But hey, we're good at that, too. ~ Deb Caletti, #NFDB |
| 1335:In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realise it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it--with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited--it takes on a life of its own. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB |
1336:Solitude
It's something they carry with them
- explorers night shifts seamen like a good pair of binoculars
or a camera case
perfectly and deeply compartmented.
It has a quiet patina
that both absorbs and reflects
like a valuable instrument
you have to sign for
- contract with alone and at the end of the voyage
you get to keep.
Sometimes it's very far away.
Sometimes so close
at first you think the person next to you
is picking up putting down
a personal cup
a book in another language
before you realise what
- when talk has moved off
leaning its arms
on someone else's table is being
handed to you.
~ Caroline Mavis Caddy,#NFDB |
| 1337:Is that what happened to Mercier?” “No—not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi’s work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon.” Clavain raised an eyebrow. “The other side?” “The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply.” “You’re talking about tachyonic matter,” Clavain said. “Matter travelling faster than light. ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB |
1338:Acquaintance
Not we who daily walk the City's street;
Not those who have been cradled in its heart,
Best understand its architectural art,
Or realise its grandeur. Oft we meet
Some stranger who has stayed his passing feet
And lingered with us for a single hour,
And learned more of cathedral, and of tower,
Than we, who deem our knowledge quite complete.
Not always those we hold most loved and dear,
Not always those who dwell with us, know best
Our greater selves. Because they stand so near
They cannot see the lofty mountain crest,
The gleaming sun-kissed height, which fair and dear
Stands forth-revealed unto the some-time guest.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB |
1339:Le point final du processus dialectique represente l'esprit qui se reconnait comme l'ultime realite, et realise que tout ce qu'il a considere jusqu'alors comme etranger et hostile a lui-meme,
en verite, en fait partie integrante. Il s'agit simultanement d'un etat de connaissance absolue ou l'esprit s'identifie enfin comme etant l'ultime realite, mais aussi un etat de liberte totale dans lequel l'esprit, au lieu d'etre controlee par des forces exterieures, est capable d'organiser le monde d'une facon rationnelle. Il prend alors conscience que le monde est en fait lui-meme, et qu'il lui suffit simplement de mettre en oeuvre ses propres principes de rationalite afin de l'organizer rationalement. ~ Peter Singer,#NFDB |
| 1340:The dreamer is now in pleasure, now in pain ; This hour in confidence, the next in fear. He is without stability and has no abiding refuge. When the monsters of remorse and retribution pursue him, whither can he fly ? There is no place of safety unless he awake. Let the dreamer struggle with his dream ; Let him strive to realise the illusory nature of all self-seeking desire, And lo! he will open his spiritual eyes upon the world of Light and Truth; He will awake, and will see all things in their right relations and true proportions ; He will be happy, sane, and peaceful seeing things as they are. Truth is the light of universe, the day of the mind ; In it there is no error, no anguish, and no fear. ~ James Allen, #NFDB |
| 1341:Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him. ~ Steven Weinberg, #NFDB |
| 1342:There's a moment when you realise all your worst fears have come true. When the fat girl stuffing her face in the corner finally recognises food gives her the comfort she can't find in anyone else. When the gorgeous man with the body of a god realises he changes women like shoes because he's scared one won't find enough reason to stay. When you see the world for what it really is, see it for all the horrors the news can't or won't report. There's a moment when you realise and accept that you are the worthless piece of shit your father always said you were, because even a diseased crack-head wouldn't kill their own sister. It was a moment Kerestyan, a defining moment...an epiphany of imperfection. ~ Jennifer Turner, #NFDB |
1343:Valkyrie Cain got out of the passenger side. She zipped up
her black jacket against the cold, and joined Skulduggery as he
walked up to the front door. She glanced at him, and saw that he was smiling.
"Stop doing that,” she sighed.
“Stop doing what?” Skulduggery responded in that gloriously velvet voice of his.
“Stop smiling. The person we want to talk to lives in the only dark house on a bright street. That’s not a good sign.”
“I didn’t realise I was smiling,” he said.
They stopped at the door, and Skulduggery made a concerted effort to shift his features. His mouth twitched
downwards. “Am I smiling now?”
“No.”
“Excellent,” he said, and the smile immediately sprang back up. ~ Derek Landy,#NFDB |
1344:There is a name for that pebble: passion. It can be used
to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people, but it isn't just that.
It's there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real
fervour, in the certainty that one is going to realise a dream. Passion sends us signals that
guide us through our lives, and it's up to me to interpret those signs.
I would like to believe that I'm in love. With
someone I don't know and who didn't figure in my plans at
all. All these months of self-control, of denying love, have had exactly the opposite result: I
have let myself be swept away by the first person to treat me a little differently. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB |
| 1345:whatever you intend to do, don’t waste it, lad. You’ve only got one life. But, you know, you never realise this until you are halfway through it, that’s if you get the chance to reach that stage. Often life is taken from people before they realise that they value it. I used to be always sorry when I heard of life being snatched from the young. But then again, it might have been better that way for them, for it may have saved them suppin’ sorrow. You know, Joseph, I’m a very healthy woman. I’ve never known a day’s illness in me life and yet I’ve known such unhappiness that at times I would have swapped it for the peace which some chronic invalids seem to have inside themselves. D’you know what I mean? ~ Catherine Cookson, #NFDB |
| 1346:(...) a wealthy Indian princeling named Gotana (...) came to realise, after a long andmoving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the things we cherish inevitably change and rot, and desires are inevitably disappointed. But he also realized that, simply by sitting and breathing, people can begin to disengage from the normal run of desires and disappointments, and come to grasp that the self whom the sitter has been serving so frantically, and who is sufferin from all these needs, is an illusion. Set free from the self's anxieties and appetites and constant, petulant demands, the meditator can see and share the actualities of existence with others. The sitter becomes less selfish and more selfless. ~ Adam Gopnik, #NFDB |
| 1347:There's a fleeting moment that exists for every individual just before they do something truly life-altering. Its that flash of insight and sanity that stalls your heartbeat and bloo flow - a quick warning - just before you explode and make a fool of yourself. Or that incredible brief instant of clarity you have before you floor the gas pedal and run the red light. It's a split second of self admonishment in which you realise that what you're about to do is wrong, but just as quickly choose to ignore that realisation and do it anyway. It's too fast to catch, too bright to see, utterly gone even before you've blinked and therefore, it does a person absolutely no good at all. And yet, there it is. ~ Heather Killough Walden, #NFDB |
| 1348:Every day,” I said honestly. “I missed you every hour. And do you know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. I’d catch myself walking around to find you, not for any reason, just out of habit, because I’d seen something that I wanted to tell you about or because I wanted to hear your voice. And then I’d realise that you weren’t there any more, and every time, every single time, it was like having the wind knocked out of me. I’ve risked my life for you. I’ve walked half the length of Ravka for you, and I’d do it again and again and again just to be with you, just to starve with you and freeze with you and hear you complain about hard cheese every day. So don’t tell me we don’t belong ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB |
| 1349:But what do you say to this argument (help me with it): ghosts are, as it were, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB |
| 1350:He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this "hideous" dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a "rehearsal" of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB |
| 1351:Turtles don’t have nations. Or flags. Or strategic nuclear weapons. They don’t have terrorism or referendums or trade wars with China. They don’t have Spotify playlists for their workouts. They don’t have books on the decline and fall of turtle empires. They don’t have internet shopping or self-service checkouts. Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB |
| 1352:But he had started to realise that what he called need was actually something else, was more a question of surfeit, of the desire to have something in limitless supply. And by its very nature that thing would have to be relatively worthless, like the cheese sandwich, of which there was an infinite and easily accessible number. To desire something better required self-control, required an acceptance of the fact that you might not have it for ever and that even if you did you would never feel full to bursting on it. It left you alone with yourself, that desire, and when he thought about his life he saw it as a series of attempts to lose himself by merging with something else, something outside him that could be internalised ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB |
1353:Above the abbot's desk, two little prints. Icons, I suppose he would call them. A male figure and a female one. The male one is standing on a green hill and has a white dove perched on his shoulder.
He sees me looking.
'You'll recognize our patron, of course?'
It takes me a second, but I realise he's talking about St. David, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century and the patron saint of Wales.
'David,' I say. 'A local boy.'
'Local enough. He was preaching at the Synod of Brefi to a large crowd. Because those at the back couldn't hear him, a small hill rose up beneath him. The dove here settled on his shoulder.'
'That's his big miracle?' I ask. 'Making a hill. In Wales? ~ Harry Bingham,#NFDB |
| 1354:You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . . (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s . . .) LUIS BUÑUEL This moving and frightening segment in Buñuel’s recently translated memoirs raises fundamental questions – clinical, practical, existential, philosophical: what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time? ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB |
| 1355:According to Imam al-Ghazali, there are four worldly and four spiritual tips to help a person perform tahajjud. The worldly tips are: •Avoid overeating, and over-drinking, which would lead to heavy sleep. •Avoid tiring the body during the day in what is not beneficial. •Take to the afternoon nap, which helps you pray at night. •Never commit sins during the day, which may prevent you from praying tahajjud. The spiritual tips are: •To purify your heart of any resentment against another Muslim. •To constantly have fear in your heart of your Lord and realise that your life is short. •To understand the benefit of tahajjud. •To love Allah, and have strong faith when you stand in prayer in the night, calling upon Allah. ~ Mohammed Abu Productive Faris, #NFDB |
| 1356:After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him. ~ Andrew Wilson, #NFDB |
| 1357:I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another? ~ John Banville, #NFDB |
1358:all life is yoga.. :::
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and - highest condition of victory in that effort - union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 6,#NFDB |
| 1359:Contrary to Expectation. A wise man, the wonder of his age, taught his disciples from a seemingly inexhaustible store of wisdom. He attributed all his knowledge to a thick tome which was kept in a place of honour in his room. The sage would allow nobody to open the volume. When he died, those who had surrounded him, regarding themselves as his heirs, ran to open the book, anxious to possess what it contained. They were surprised, confused and disappointed when they found that there was writing on only one page. They became even more bewildered and then annoyed when they tried to penetrate the meaning of the phrase which met their eyes. It was: 'When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB |
| 1360:Speaking of the capitulation of Bulgaria, an event decisive to the outcome of the First World War and therefore to the end of a civilisation, Count Karolyi writes that while he was living through it he did not realise its importance, because "at that moment, 'that moment' had not yet become 'that moment'". The same is true in fiction for Fabrizio del Dongo, concerning the battle of Waterloo: while he is fighting it, it does not exist. In the pure present, the only dimension, however, in which we live, there is no history. At no single instant is there such a thing as the Fascist period or the October revolution, because in that fraction of a second there is only the mouth swallowing saliva, the movement of a hand, a glance at the window. ~ Claudio Magris, #NFDB |
| 1361:Let me repeat: to talk of 'directiveness' , or purpose in this limited sense, in ontogeny, has become respectable once more; but to apply these terms to phylogeny is still considered heretical (or at least in bad taste). But phylogeny is an abstraction, which only acquires a concrete meaning when we realise that 'phylogeny, evolutionary descent, is a sequence of ontogenies', and that 'the course of evolution is through changes in ontogeny'. The quotations in the previous sentence are actually also by Simpson and contain the answer to his own conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose. The Purposer is each and every individual organism, from the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of its limited opportunities. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB |
| 1362:Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind. ~ Greg Dening, #NFDB |
1363:Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy.
There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it. ~ Charlotte Eriksson,#NFDB |
| 1364:And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do—if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are—then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about. And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act? But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
| 1365:It is a commonplace that every age, or almost every age, thinks that its own time is one of special difficulty. The barbarians seem always to be at the gate. Alas, in our present day this is rather too literally so. But what many fail to realise is that the barbarians are a more various and numerous group than just those unspeakable villains who behead hostages in the desert. Barbarians might also wear ties and travel business class, they might occupy seats of power in government. They might be us, ourselves, when we give up certain civil liberties and betray our own values in the spurious belief that this will protect us from terrorism, organised crime, unwelcome immigration. Forms of dismantling civilisation might differ, but the result is the same. ~ A C Grayling, #NFDB |
| 1366:Maybe this is how it always is. Maybe someone always wants more. Maybe everyone has a time when they realise that they've been accidentally lying when they say I love you, I miss you, you're pretty, you're the prettiest one, I never want you to leave. Maybe this time ends and it all becomes true again, as true as you ever thought it was. Maybe this time does not end. If this time ends, it would be a smart decision to wait it out. If it does not end, then perhaps you should not wait, and you should find another person to whom you can say these things without lying. But perhaps it always happens, no matter which girl or boy you are trying to love, in which case you might as well stay where you are because you would repeat the same process with anyone else. ~ Haley Tanner, #NFDB |
1367:Q:How shall I realise God?
M.: God is an unknown entity. Moreover He is external. Whereas, the Self is always with you and it is you. Why do you leave out what is intimate and go in for what is external?
D.: What is this Self again?
M.: The Self is known to everyone but not clearly. You always exist. The Be-ing is the Self. 'I am' is the name of God. Of all the definitions of God, none is indeed so well put as the Biblical statement "I AM THAT I AM" in EXODUS (Chap. 3). There are other statements, such as Brahmaivaham, Aham Brahmasmi and Soham. But none is so direct as the name JEHOVAH = I AM. The Absolute Being is what is - It is the Self. It is God. Knowing the Self, God is known. In fact God is none other than the Self. ~ Sri Ramama Maharshi, Collected Works,#NFDB |
| 1368:I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things-- wink the other eye. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB |
1369:Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced 20 years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head.
At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.
Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together. ~ Deborah Levy,#NFDB |
1370:It could be yesterday
when I was less in love
I think
For I didn’t see you in the mirror
behind me
while getting dressed.
The way your hands couldn’t stay away
and our bodies always found their ways back to each other
as if they were meant to be together
Close.
But then it was today and I saw you
again
in the mirror
behind me while getting dressed
So I go to sleep tonight
alone
without actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake up
and realise it was just a dream
You’re actually gone.
Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrow
hoping that I will be less in love
again
Like yesterday
But not today.
I was never really well with things at all. ~ Charlotte Eriksson,#NFDB |
| 1371:Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. ... If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to… what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place. I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realise with stupor how much I was gypped. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB |
| 1372:Yes, it’s unfortunate that we have been conditioned to see an alternative to motherhood as not normal. But you do all realise that some of the most brilliant women in the world don’t have kids, right? Oprah, Gloria Steinem, Helen Mirren, Dolly Parton? Do you think their lives carry an air of tragedy because they never had children? I don’t. I’m sure they all had different reasons for not doing it, some maybe couldn’t, some didn’t want to, but these women’s lives are not empty because of that. I think it’s important we take the lead from our heroes and for everyone to stop valuing women on whether they do, or do not, become mothers. The irony of yours and your listeners’ opinions is that it is you boxing women in to these roles, not men. It’s highly un-feminist of you.’ She ~ Dawn O Porter, #NFDB |
| 1373:One morning indeed, I felt a sudden misgiving that she not only had left the house but had gone for good: I had just heard the sound of a door which seemed to me to be that of her room. On tiptoe I crept towards the room, opened the door, stood upon the threshold. In the dim light the bedclothes bulged in a semi-circle, that must be Albertine who, with her body bent, was sleeping with her feet and face to the wall. Only, overflowing the bed, the hair upon that head, abundant and dark, made me realise that it was she, that she had not opened her door, had not stirred, and I felt that this motionless and living semi-circle, in which a whole human life was contained and which was the only thing to which I attached any value, I felt that it was there, in my despotic possession. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB |
1374:Breaking our silence is powerful. Whether it comes as a whisper or a squeak at first, allow that sense of spaciousness, of opening, allow yourself to trust the bottomlessness, and lean into the dark roar which will light up every cell.
Though it may start softly, we build in confidence and skills, we realise we do not need to wait for permission before we open our mouths. We do not need to wait for others to make space for us, we can take it. We do not need to read from others’ scripts or style ourselves in weak comparison. We do not need to look to another’s authority because we have our own. Down in our cores. We have waited so long for permission to know that it was our time, our turn on stage. That time is now. Our voices are being heard into being. They are needed. ~ Lucy H Pearce,#NFDB |
1375:O DIVINE Force, supreme Illuminator, hearken to our prayer, move not away from us, do not withdraw, help us to fight the good fight, make firm our strength for the struggle, give us the force to conquer!
O my sweet Master, Thou whom I adore without being able to know Thee, Thou who I am without being able to realise Thee, my entire conscious individuality prostrates itself before Thee and implores, in the name of the workers in their struggle, and of the earth in her agony, in the name of suffering humanity and of striving Nature;
O my sweet Master, O marvellous Unknowable, O Dispenser of all boons, Thou who makest light spring forth in the darkness and strength to arise out of weakness, support our effort, guide our steps, lead us to victory.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations, 211,#NFDB |
| 1376:It’s 20 February 1995. I am standing by a graveside, the wind whistling through my hair like a wind whistle. My father died on 15 February, and has now been buried. At a sparsely attended funeral, his casket has been blessed and lowered into the ground. I am invited to be the first to throw earth into the grave. I crouch down and, unsure of how much to put in (why don’t they just tell you?), I push up my jacket sleeves and use both arms to sweep an enormous mound of earth from behind me and into the hole – like a couple of arm bulldozers. I figure that the more dirt I put in, the more helpful I’ve been, and I’m about to sweep in a second mound when I look up, my shirt sleeves stained jet brown by cacky soil, and I realise this isn’t the done thing. My mother tuts and looks away. ~ Alan Partridge, #NFDB |
| 1377:No? You don’t think so?” Svidrigaïlov went on, looking at him deliberately. “But what do you say to this argument (help me with it): ghosts are as it were shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB |
| 1378:We have got to realise the littleness of creation and to see it for the nothing that it is before we can love and possess God who is uncreated. This is the reason why we have no ease of heart or soul, for we are seeking our rest in trivial things which cannot satisfy, and not seeking to know God, almighty, all-wise, all-good. He is true rest. It is His will that we should know Him, and His pleasure that we should rest in Him. Nothing less will satisfy us. [...] We shall never cease wanting and longing until we possess Him in fullness and joy. Then we shall have no further wants. Meanwhile His will is that we go on knowing and loving until we are perfected in heaven. [...] The more clearly the soul sees the blessed face by grace and love, the more it longs to see it in its fullness. ~ Julian of Norwich, #NFDB |
| 1379:For the more skeptical of the Victorians, love performed some of the functions of the God whom they had lost. Faced with it, many of even the most hard-headed turned, for the moment; mystical. They found themselves in the presence of something which awoke in them that sense of reverence which nothing else claimed, and something to which they felt, even in the very depth of their being, that an unquestioning loyalty was due. For them love, like God, demanded all sacrifices; but like Him, also, it rewarded the believer by investing all the phenomena of life with a meaning not yet analysed away. We have grown used - more than they - to a Godless universe, but we are not yet accustomed to one which is loveless as well, and only when we have so become shall we realise what atheism really means. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB |
1380:Talk 3.
A question was asked as to the nature of happiness.
M.: If a man thinks that his happiness is due to external causes and his possessions, it is reasonable to conclude that his happiness must increase with the increase of possessions and diminish in proportion to their diminution. Therefore if he is devoid of possessions, his happiness should be nil. What is the real experience of man? Does it conform to this view?
In deep sleep the man is devoid of possessions, including his own body. Instead of being unhappy he is quite happy. Everyone desires to sleep soundly. The conclusion is that happiness is inherent in man and is not due to external causes. One must realise his Self in order to open the store of unalloyed happiness. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramanasramam,#NFDB |
| 1381:Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.” So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro, #NFDB |
1382:While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.
Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty. ~ Alain de Botton,#NFDB |
1383:I also think Valkyire’s ex-boyfriend will come in handy here.”
Ravel frowned, “The dead vampire?”
Valkyrie glared at him, “I think he means Fletcher.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Caelen was never my boyfriend.”
“I didn’t mean to-“
“We never talk about Caelen,” Ghastly muttered.”
“I’m really sorry, Valkyrie, Ravel said. “Fletcher’s great. He’s wonderful. I’m sure he’d be delighted to help, and having a teleporter here will certainly solve some problems. We’ll arrange that, we’ll get him over to you, start the ball rolling, as it were. Once again, sorry about bringing up the vampire.”
Ghastly shot him a look whispered, “Why do you keep talking about him?”
“I can’t help it,” Ravel whispered back. “Now he’s all I can think about.”
“You realise,” Valkyrie said, “that we can hear you both perfectly well. ~ Derek Landy,#NFDB |
1384:They Tell Me Your Colour Is Blue
They tell me your colour is blue
My life-breath feeds on your inspiring luminous pastures
All that stands still or moves has turned into grass
In celebration of your much-extolled blueness
It is also said that you are unfathomable
Those who know your exact whereabouts say so on oath
I am happier to realise you in your lost but similar addresses
In your nature that spurns all limits
All awareness turns over
In a winking of your eyes
Your serpentine power looms throughout your being
It shows us our destined parts in your vast anatomy
You - from the number one to its zillionth decimal - are
A unique curvature unto yourself
That has no outer shell nor has any inner space.
[Translated from Shesha: Selected Marathi Poems ]
~ Dilip Chitre,#NFDB |
1385:'And I protested. ''What do you mean, Diotima? Are you actually saying Love is ugly and bad?''
''Watch what you say!'' she exclaimed. ''Do you really think that if something is not beautiful it has to be ugly?''
''I certainly do''.
''And something that is not wise is ignorant, I suppose? Have you not noticed that there is something in between wisdom and ignorance?''
''And what is that?''
''Correct belief. 148 I am talking about having a correct belief without being able to give a reason for it. Don't you realise that this state cannot be called knowing - for how can it be knowledge 149 if it lacks reason?
And it is not ignorance either - for how can it be ignorance if it has hit upon the truth? Correct belief clearly occupies just such a middle state, between wisdom 150 and ignorance''. ~ Plato, Symposium, 202a,#NFDB |
| 1386:Even by Harry’s low standards in Divination, the exam went very badly. He might as well have tried to see moving pictures on the desktop as in the stubbornly blank crystal ball; he lost his head completely during tea-leaf reading, saying it looked to him as though Professor Marchbanks would shortly be meeting a round, dark, soggy stranger, and rounded off the whole fiasco by mixing up the life and head lines on her palm and informing her that she ought to have died the previous Tuesday. ‘Well, we were always going to fail that one,’ said Ron gloomily as they ascended the marble staircase. He had just made Harry feel rather better by telling him how he had told the examiner in detail about the ugly man with a wart on his nose in his crystal ball, only to look up and realise he had been describing his examiner’s reflection. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB |
1387:He was obviously fencing with her, and the sooner he was made to realise that such tactics would not answer the better it would be. So she said coldly: ‘You must know very well that I am Fanny’s aunt.’
‘Yes, you’ve just told me so,’ he agreed.
‘You knew it as soon as I made myself known to you!’ She checked herself, determined not to lose her temper, and said, as pleasantly as she could: ‘Come, Mr Calverleigh! let us be frank! I imagine you also know why I did make myself known to you. You certainly contrived to ingratiate yourself with my sister, but you can hardly have supposed that you would find all Fanny’s relations so complaisant!’
He was watching her rather intently, but with an expression of enjoyment which she found infuriating. He said: ‘No, I couldn’t, could I? Still, if your sister likes me – ! ~ Georgette Heyer,#NFDB |
1388:Therefore there is only one solution: to unite ourselves by aspiration, concentration, interiorisation and identification with the supreme Will. And that is both omnipotence and perfect freedom at the same time. And that is the only omnipotence and the only freedom; everything else is an approximation. You may be on the way, but it is not the entire thing. So if you experience this, you realise that with this supreme freedom and supreme power there is also a total peace and a serenity that never fails.
Therefore, if you feel something which is not that, a revolt, a disgust, something which you cannot accept, it means that in you there is a part which has not been touched by the transformation, something which has kept the old consciousness, something which is still on the path - that is all.
~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,#NFDB |
1389:It was with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914. Then I saw men falling around me in thousands. Thus I learnt that life is a cruel struggle, and has no other object but the preservation of the species. The individual can disappear, provided there are other men to replace him.
I suppose that some people are clutching their heads with both hands to find an answer to this question: "How can the Fuehrer destroy a city like St. Petersburg?" Plainly I belong by nature to quite another species. I would prefer not to see anyone suffer, not to do harm to anyone. But when I realise that the species is in danger, then in my case sentiment gives way to the coldest reason. I become uniquely aware of the sacrifices that the future will demand, to make up for the sacrifices that one hesitates to allow to-day. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB |
| 1390:Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?” “Uh-huh, ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB |
| 1391:Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented…. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
1392:There are a vast amount of Buddhas already, and each one manifests countless forms simultaneously throughout all of the planes of cyclic existence for the benefit of all beings. However, at any given time, each individual being will have a stronger karmic connection with certain Buddhas, compared to other Buddhas.
Likewise, if you were a Buddha, since a huge number of beings throughout cyclic existence would have a stronger karmic connection with you during certain times, you would be able to benefit them much more directly than the many other Buddhas would be able to. Do not forget this.
The deeper you realise this, the greater your bodhicitta motivation becomes - in other words, the greater your compassionate wish to attain the enlightened state of a Buddha for the benefit of all beings, as soon as possible!
~ Chamtrul Rinpoche,#NFDB |
1393:The pollution of the outward environment we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence
of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed. I think that this is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man's self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom.
There is a discrepancy here. We want to eliminate the measurable pollution, but we don't consider the pollution of man's soul and his creaturely form.... he must acknowledge himself as a creature and realise that there must be a sort of inner purity to his creatureliness: spiritual ecology, if you will."
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press, 1997, pp. 230-231 ~ Benedict XVI,#NFDB |
| 1394:My life has been a disaster on the grand scale - that I'd better make clear from the start. A catalogue of my former ambitions would give a Napoleon stage-fright. Art, Ethics, Theology, the Sciences (both practical and occult), even Perception itself, to say nothing of my later efforts at Empire Building, Commerce and Exploration - each of these were at some stage fields which I intended to master. My personality accepted no limits; all that could be conceived was possible. For me, personally. And now, even when I've come to the point where all personal considerations disgust me, I still realise the sublime inevitability of it all. I wasn't mistaken; I was merely trapped. Born trapped. Condemned for the length of a lifetime to play this buffoon Arthur Rimbaud. Yes, it's true what I always used to think when I was a kid: I is another. ~ Paul Strathern, #NFDB |
1395:When the resolution has been taken, when you have decided that the whole of your life shall be given to the Divine, you have still at every moment to remember it and carry it out in all the details of your existence. You must feel at every step that you belong to the Divine; you must have the constant experience that, in whatever you think or do, it is always the Divine Consciousness that is acting through you. You have no longer anything that you can call your own; you feel everything as coming from the Divine, and you have to offer it back to its source. When you can realise that, then even the smallest thing to which you do not usually pay much attention or care, ceases to be trivial and insignificant; it becomes full of meaning and it opens up a vast horizon beyond."
Questions and Answers 1929 (28 April)
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#NFDB |
1396:I am pitching it feebly," said young Bingo earnestly. "You haven't heard the thing. I have. Rosie shoved the cylinder on the dictating-machine last night before dinner, and it was grisly to hear the instrument croaking out those awful sentences. If that article appears I shall be kidded to death by every pal I've got. Bertie," he said, his voice sinking to a hoarse whisper, "you have about as much imagination as a warthog, but surely even you can picture to yourself what Jimmy Bowles and Tuppy Rogers, to name only tow, will say when they see me referred to in print as "half god, half prattling, mischievous child"?"
I jolly well could
"She doesn't say that?"I gasped.
"She certainly does. And when I tell you that I selected that particular quotation because it's about the only one I can stand hearing spoken, you will realise what I'm up against. ~ P G Wodehouse,#NFDB |
| 1397:Stunned, I sat down on the bed, reading the message over and over again, convinced I had misunderstood it in some way. I couldn’t believe that Jack would have written something so cruel or been so cutting. He had never spoken to me in such a way before, he had never even raised his voice to me. I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face. Surely I deserved some explanation and, at the very least, an apology? I needed to talk to someone, badly, so it was sobering to realise there was no one I could call. My parents and I didn’t have the sort of relationship that would allow me to sob down the phone that he had left me by myself and for some reason I felt too ashamed to tell any of my friends. Where had the perfect gentleman I’d thought him to be gone? Had it all been a facade, had he covered his true self with a cloak of geniality and good humour to impress me? ~ B A Paris, #NFDB |
| 1398:I believe now that no matter what we consciously believe to be our true destination in life, unless we explore them all, we will never find it. The search may continue forever, and sometimes the only way to take some rest, is to convince ourselves that we have finally arrived, till we realise that we cannot stay where we are anymore. Hence we look back at the whole life itinerary, scanning all routes, crossroads and roundabouts, searching for a missing dream. We acknowledge whether we turned right, left, went straight or back. And no matter how far in space and time is that crossroad, we will return there and choose otherwise. When happiness or pain reach their climax, we often believe that the journey is over. And yet I can assure you that this is the best moment to acknowledge which routes we did not take, which dream we didn't dream, and choose again. ~ Franco Santoro, #NFDB |
1399:Were you happy when you painted these pictures?’ asked Mr. Rochester presently.
‘I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’
‘That is not saying much. Your pleasures, by your own account, have been few; but I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist’s dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints. Did you sit at them long each day?’
‘I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation, and I sat at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night: the length of the midsummer days favoured my inclination to apply.’
‘And you felt self-satisfied with the result of your ardent labours?’
‘Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise. ~ Charlotte Bront,#NFDB |
1400:They will ask us in the future how it happened,
who allowed it, how could we just ignore it
when it stormed in so loudly,
like a thunderous beast,
could we not hear it?
This half beast half demon sitting
outside our doors, growling,
baring teeth, ready to rip out
the throats of whole people
erase the marginalized,
rip into the bones of the vulnerable,
why did we just sit there and watch
helplessly, asking no questions,
show them the evidence of
the thunderous applause
each act of cruelty is greeted with,
show them the raucous laughter
with which they celebrate the pain
each marginalized person feels
as their rights and liberties are taken.
Let them see for themselves
The bare bones of truth
until they realise, like us, horrified,
"The cruelty was the point.
My God, the cruelty was the point. ~ Nikita Gill,#NFDB |
| 1401:The universe and the individual are necessary to each other in their ascent. Always indeed they exist for each other and profit by each other. Universe is a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and Time, the individual its concentration within limits of Space and Time. Universe seeks in infinite extension the divine totality it feels itself to be but cannot entirely realise; for in extension existence drives at a pluralistic sum of itself which can neither be the primal nor the final unit, but only a recurring decimal without end or beginning. Therefore it creates in itself a self-conscious concentration of the All through which it can aspire. In the conscious individual Prakriti turns back to perceive Purusha, World seeks after Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, 50, [T9], #NFDB |
| 1402:I have said that from a young age children should be taught to respect good health, physical strength and balance. The great importance of beauty must also be emphasised. A young child should aspire for beauty, not for the sake of pleasing others or winning their admiration, but for the love of beauty itself; for beauty is the ideal which all physical life must realise. Every human being has the possibility of establishing harmony among the different parts of his body and in the various movements of the body in action. Every human body that undergoes a rational method of culture from the very beginning of its existence can realise its own harmony and thus become fit to manifest beauty. When we speak of the other aspects of an integral education, we shall see what inner conditions are to be fulfilled so that this beauty can one day be manifested. ~ The Mother, On Education, Physical Education, #NFDB |
1403:He doesn't realise how much it hurts me when he's so curt," his mother said sorrowfully.
"He doesn't mean it," I said. "It's just calving. I expect every dairy farmer in the country is being rude to his mother just now."
"It's Rose, too," she told me. "He's such a dear boy Josie; it's tearing him apart to see her so unwell. Perhaps-" she paused and looked at me with a Madonna-like expression of patient and loving reproach - "perhaps it might help if you didn't expect him to dance attendance very spare minute, hmmm ?"
My hand clenched on the handle of my fork as I considered throwing it at her like a spear. I've got pretty good aim - I'd probably be able to get her in the side of the head from here. But the consequences wouldn't be worth the fleeting satisfaction. I dropped my eyes to my plate and nodded.
"You're a sweet girl. I know you don't mean to be selfish. ~ Danielle Hawkins,#NFDB |
| 1404:Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy--which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances...If the sun is shining, stand in it---yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass--they have to because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning--- a meaningful life. There's the hap-- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use---that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. The pursuit isn't all or nothing--- it's all AND nothing. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB |
1405:In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.
What kind of idiot came up with that rule? The didn't understand human nature at all.
She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two different entities with seperate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn't realise that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest. ~ Sharon Guskin,#NFDB |
| 1406:A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not. ~ Shaun Bythell, #NFDB |
| 1407:maps. I was less clueless about the basics of English, though I didn’t realise at the time that I was assuming that English grammar was the same as the Latin grammar I had been taught so well. (I remember that the first week I was there, a boy asked me during prep whether ager was second or third declension and I was able to tell him without pausing for thought that ager—a field—was second declension, so it went like annus, but that it dropped the “e,” as opposed to agger—a rampart—which was third declension, and retained the “e.” “My God,” I thought as he walked away, “Captain Lancaster did a good job.” My next thought was, “Lucky the boy didn’t ask me what a rampart was.…”) But given that I was teaching ten-year-olds, Geoffrey Tolson’s advice to “stay a page ahead” seemed perfectly sound. So I had no reason to believe, as I strode purposefully into the classroom to teach Form III their first history ~ John Cleese, #NFDB |
| 1408:The nihilist makes one mistake: he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor. He has no consciousness of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible, is itself a product of history, is itself the outcome of all the renunciations of humanity that have been made over the centuries. Indeed, the history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually undo history itself. For clear awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing with a consciousness of the successive renunciations of the past, and thus too with the real desire to pick up the movement of transcendence everywhere in space and time where it has been prematurely interrupted. ~ Raoul Vaneigem, #NFDB |
1409:We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion,
Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late, when they pass away.
We were talking about the love we all could share.
When we find it, to try our best to hold it there.
With our love, with our love, we could save the world.
If they only knew.
Try to realise it's all within yourself―
No one else can make you change―
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you.
We were talking about the love that's gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul.
They don't know, they can't see.
Are you one of them?
When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there,
And the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you and without you. ~ George Harrison,#NFDB |
1410:Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.
This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. ~ Mark Haddon,#NFDB |
| 1411:These buildings exist to house the small businesses inside them, but just barely, like bomb shelters. You get in, you do what you need to do, you get out. They are life-draining for the people who work in them, and a daily misery for the people who visit them, though they may not realise it. Marc Augé calls them ‘non-places’, and they are unfortunately the defining spaces of the late twentieth – and by all appearances, the twenty-first – century in America. What we build not only reflects but determines who we are and who we’ll be. ‘A city is an attempt at a kind of collective immortality,’ wrote Marshall Berman in an essay on urban ruin: ‘we die, but we hope our city’s forms and structures will live on’. The opposite is true in the suburbs. They have no history and don’t think about the future; very little there is built to last. Posterity is irrelevant to a civilisation living in an ongoing, never-ending present... ~ Lauren Elkin, #NFDB |
| 1412:In Mexico he has only seen wild ones, and only far away. ‘I like to watch them because they are . . .’ And he makes a movement with one hand as if it were something lifting into the air. ‘Free,’ I say. He nods, and I do too, and in some wonder, because I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal. ~ Helen Macdonald, #NFDB |
| 1413:mouth rendered decorative by a shade of lipstick which was new to Ione. For the rest, a plain dark skirt and jumper. As the talk about the tea-table went on, Ione began to adjust herself. There was no fault to be found in Jacqueline Delauny’s manner. She was pleasant, with just the right amount to say for herself, and she really appeared to exercise a tactful influence upon Margot Trent. If it had not been for Allegra, sitting there like her own ghost with no more to say than an occasional yes or no to a question too direct to be ignored, Ione would have found it all agreeable enough. As it was, she possessed her soul in patience against the moment when they would be alone. Allegra could hardly avoid taking her to her room or going up with her when she went to bed. She did not realise until afterwards that she had used the word avoid — not in fact until she was herself alone in her bedroom after the last good-night had been said. ~ Patricia Wentworth, #NFDB |
1414:What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.
And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,#NFDB |
| 1415:The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is ‘heroism’. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities. From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism. War makes one realise the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a ‘more-than-life’, and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB |
| 1416:It must be about six o’clock. My knees are tense. I realise that what I used to refer to, to Mother Sugar, as “the housewife’s disease”has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael’s-breakfast-don’t-forget-I’m-out-of-tea-etc.-etc. With this useless but apparently unavoidable tension resentment is also switched on. Resentment against what? An unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details. The resentment focuses itself on Michael; although I know with my intelligence it has nothing to do with Michael. And yet I do resent him, because he will spend his day, served by secretaries, nurses, women in all kinds of capacities, who will take this weight off him. I try to relax myself, to switch off the current. But my limbs have started to ache, and I must turn over. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB |
1417:You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... ~ Kevin Brooks,#NFDB |
1418:I've realised that sometimes you get no second chance and that it's best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course it's risky, but is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took forty-eight hours to bring me here having an accident? If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I'm looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I've had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough tome already) finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.
And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine; it's best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB |
| 1419:When people come to you to be married, you tend to put the couple through their paces beforehand, don’t you?’ ‘I give them pastoral advice.’ ‘You tell them what marriage is all about; warn them that it’s not all lovey-dovey and that as soon as you have children it’s a different kettle of fish altogether . . . .’ Knowing that Inspector Keating had three children under the age of seven, Sidney recognised that he had to be careful of his reply: ‘Well, I . . .’ ‘There’s the money worries, and the job worries and you start to grow old. Then you realise that you’ve married someone with whom you have nothing in common. You have nothing left to say to each other. That’s the kind of thing you tell them, isn’t it?’ ‘I wouldn’t put it exactly like that . . .’ ‘But that’s the gist?’ ‘I do like to make it a bit more optimistic, Geordie. How friendship sometimes matters more than passion. The importance of kindness . . .’ ‘Yes, yes, but you know what I’m getting at. ~ James Runcie, #NFDB |
| 1420:There is no "tropical island paradise" I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB |
| 1421:scientists" as a class all the world over. What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellow scientists and a mystery to the general public, and what is not is evident. There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To witness some queer, shy, misshapen, grey-headed, self-important, little discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his fellow-men, or to read the anguish of Nature at the "neglect of science" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society by, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on the work of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one to realise the unfaltering littleness of men. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB |
1422:One of the things that strikes me most though is how some people don't realise they're self-harming. The phrase 'self-harm' brings up thoughts of 'cutting', but that's only a small portion of it. When you drink excessively to drown your sorrows to the point you throw up and can't see straight and/or, like a girl at my school, ended up being driven to hospital to have her stomach pumped, you've brought harm to yourself. If you take drugs to feel numb and it becomes an addiction that you can't break, you've self-harmed. When you starve yourself or binge eat to fit the latest fashions, you're pushing your body further than it can go.
We need to start treating ourselves how we deserve to be treated, even if you feel that no one else does. Prove to the world you ARE worth something by treating yourself with the utmost respect and hope that other people will follow your example. And even if they don't, at least one person in the world is treating you well: YOU. ~ Carrie Hope Fletcher,#NFDB |
1423:Confession
'To take a homeopathic approach to the soul is to deal with
the darkness in ways that are in tune with the dark.'
---Thomas Moore
It’s taken time
to realise
no one survives.
Not even the ordinary.
Time to own up then
to blue throat
and gall bladder extraordinaire,
to rages pristine,
guilt unsmeared
by mediocrity,
separation traumas
subcontinental
and griefs that dare
to be primordial.
Time to iron out
a face corrugated
by perennial hope,
time to shrug off
the harlotry
and admit
there’s nothing hygienic
about this darkness –
no potted palms,
no elevator music.
I erupt from pillars,
half-lion half-woman.
The ?oor space index I demand
is nothing short
of epic.
I still wait sometimes
for a ?icker of revelation
but for the most part
I’m unbribable.
When I open the coffee percolator
the roof ?ies off.
~ Arundhathi Subramaniam,#NFDB |
| 1424:It wasn't that Harry had gone down the wrong path, it wasn't that the road to sanity lay somewhere outside of science. But reading science papers hadn't been enough. All the cognitive psychology papers about known bugs in the human brain and so on had helped, but they hadn't been sufficient. He'd failed to reach what Harry was starting to realise was a shockingly high standard of being so incredibly, unbelievably rational that you actually started to get things right,as opposed to having a handy language in which to describe afterwards everything you'd just done wrong. Harry could look back now and apply ideas like 'motivated cognition' to see where he'd gone astray over the last year. That counted for something, when it came to being saner in the future. That was better than having no idea what he'd done wrong. But that wasn't yet being the person who could pass through Time's narrow keyhole, the adult form whose possibility Dumbledore had been instructed by seers to create. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB |
1425:And that became my morning routine: orange juice, walk, yoghurt, current events. I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who anchors the headline news from six to ten AM. Boring routine, right? But the surface events of a country laboring under a dictatorship can appear boring, too—dictators like boring, dictators love boring—even as great changes are approaching beneath the surface.
A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realise once I was alone and all other voices dropped away. …Even the sudden and distressing bursts of anger weren't the heart of the matter.
That heart was a kind of pulling-away. I don't know how else to describe it. My wife had come to seem like someone…other. Most of the people in my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing was that I didn't much care. ~ Stephen King,#NFDB |
1426:The silence had for me the force of eternal life; for on the plane of eternity without beginning and without end there is no such thing as speech. (p. 19)
It was always my opinion that the best course a man could take in life was to remain silent; that one could not do better than withdraw into solitude like the bittern which spreads its wings beside some lonely lake. (p. 40)
Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that every one possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. (p. 80) ~ Sadegh Hedayat,#NFDB |
| 1427:We went on that programme and we’d done our homework, thinking we were going to get into quite a tough theological argument, but it turned out to be virtually a slinging match. We were very surprised by that. I don’t get angry very often but I got incandescent with rage at their attitude and the smugness of it. And it was really the way they played to the audience that got me. We weren’t defeated in argument at all. John was brilliant. What they were trying to do was to sort of smirk at the audience and belittle what we’d done and that seemed so out of touch and so stupid and so mistaken. I mean, how do they think the film was made? That we go in there one night, write the script and the film’s made the next morning? They don’t realise we’d been working on it for two years, we’d studied, that we had an opinion and we had an attitude, but they wouldn’t let us have that. So it was their condescension that really got me irritated.’ Gilliam remembers having never seen Palin quite so pissed off before. ~ Robert Sellers, #NFDB |
| 1428:I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age you were, remain persistently, indomitably great (Piero, Rembrandt, Degas). And then – perhaps the slowest advance of all – I permitted myself to believe, or rather see, that not all Modernism was entirely wonderful. That some parts of it were better than others; that maybe Picasso could be vainglorious, Miró and Klee could be twee, Léger could be repetitive, and so on. I eventually came to realise that Modernism had strengths and weaknesses and a built-in obsolescence, just like all other art movements. Which, as it happens, made it more rather than less interesting. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB |
1429:Dietrich Eckart always judged the world of jurists with the greatest clear-sightedness, the more so as he had himself studied law for several terms. According to his own evidence, he decided to break off these studies "so as not to become a perfect imbecile". Dietrich Eckart, by the way, is the man who had the brilliant idea of nailing the present juridical doctrines to the pillory and publishing the result in a form easily accessible to the German people. For myself, I supposed it was enough to say these things in an abbreviated form. It's only with time that I've come to realise my mistake.
Thus to-day I can declare without circumlocution that every jurist must be regarded as a man deficient by nature, or else deformed by usage. When I go over the names of the lawyers I've known in my life, and especially the advocates, I cannot help recognising by contrast how morally wholesome, honourable and rooted in the best traditions were the men with whom Dietrich Eckart and I began our struggle in Bavaria. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB |
1430:Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.
I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling? ~ Pyotr Kropotkin,#NFDB |
| 1431:I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation? The old woman stumps further and further away, she stops, pulls at a grey lock of hair which escapes from her handkerchief. She walks, she was there, now she is here... I don't know where I am any more: do i see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little; the old woman advances in the deserted street, shuffling her heavy, mannish brogues. This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it's been there for a long time. The old woman reaches the corner of the street, no more than a bundle of black clothes. All right then, it's new, she wasn't there a little while ago. But it's a tarnished deflowered newness, which can never surprise. She is going to turn the corner, she turns - during an eternity. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB |
| 1432:That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. ~ Ted Hughes, #NFDB |
| 1433:Ah don’t really know, Tam, ah jist dinnae. It kinday makes things seem mair real tae us. Life’s boring and futile. We start aof wi high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re aw gaunnae die, withoot really findin oot the big answers. We develop aw they long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality ay oor lives in different weys, withoot really extending oor body ay worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up oor lives wi shite, things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae totally pointless. Smack’s an honest drug, because it strips away these delusions. Wi smack, whin ye feel good, ye feel immortal. Whin ye feel bad, it intensifies the shite that’s already thair. It’s the only really honest drug. It doesnae alter yer consciousness. It just gies ye a hit and a sense ay well-being. Eftir that, ye see the misery ay the world as it is, and ye cannae anaesthetise yirsel against it. ~ Irvine Welsh, #NFDB |
| 1434:I once had occasion to conduct an interview with a Soviet writer (Anatoli Kusnyetsov). (...) He made a remark which is one of the most extraordinary remarks anyone has ever made to me and has echoed in my mind more often than I can say. He said to me this: that if in this world you are confronted with absolute power, power unmitigated, unrestrained, extending to every area of human life - if you are confronted with power in those terms, you are driven to realise that the only possible response to it is not some alternative power arrangement, more humane, more enlightened. The only possible response to absolute power is the absolute love which our Lord brought into the world. (...) I can see, though we in the West have not experienced this absolute power, that there would be something futile and ridiculous even in the attempt to meet such tyranny with some alternative propaganda or ideology. As between Caesar at his most absolute and God at his most remote, there is only Christ. And that was what this man said. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge, #NFDB |
| 1435:We agree that it is too late to think of visiting Cousin Ellen today – in fact if we do not hurry home we shall be late for dinner (an eventuality which cannot be contemplated with equanimity). As we near home and the hour advances, I beseech Tim to hurry. He replies indignantly that he will do nothing of the kind; why should we race home, jeopardising our very lives, for the sake of a cantankerous old woman (only he does not say ‘woman’)? Do I realise – he says bitterly – that I am becoming absolutely under the creature’s thumb? Reply that I do realise it. He then says why on earth don’t I get rid of the brute? Reply that I am too frightened of her. Tim says the thing is absolutely preposterous, Cook must go. Fortunately, we arrive just in time for dinner, and it is such an excellent meal that Tim’s heart is softened, and he says we had better give her another chance, but I must take a strong line with her and stand no nonsense. Make no reply to this command as I feel in my bones I shall not be able to comply with it. ~ D E Stevenson, #NFDB |
| 1436:What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in man's knowledge. With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour. Polish the twofold spirit heart and mind, and sharpen the twofold gaze perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.Until you realise the true Way, whether in life or in common sense, you may think that things are correct and in order. However, if we look at things objectively, from the viewpoint of laws of the world, we see various doctrines departing from the true Way. Know well this spirit, and with forthrightness as the foundation and the true spirit as the Way. Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to think of things in a wide sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existance, principle has existance, the Way has existance, spirit is nothingness. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB |
| 1437:Only after something is done do we truly realise it cannot be undone. Never had a night seemed to me so ill-omened; never had a celebration seemed to me so unjust, so cruel. The music drifting on the breeze sounded like an incantation that conjured me like a demon. I felt excluded from the joy of these people as they laughed and danced. I thought about the terrible waste my life had become … How? How could I have come so close to happiness and not had the courage to seize it with both hands? What terrible sin had I committed that I was forced to watch love seep though my fingers like blood from a wound? What is love when all it can do is survey the damage? What are its myths and legends, its victories and its miracles if a lover is not prepared to rise above, to brave the thunderbolt, to renounce eternal happiness for one kiss, one embrace, one moment with his beloved? Regret coursed through my veins like a poisonous sap, swelled my heart with loathsome fury. I hated myself, this useless burden abandoned by the roadside. ~ Yasmina Khadra, #NFDB |
1438:THE MASTER and Mover of our works is the One, the Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and Infinite. He is the transcendent unknown or unknowable Absolute, the unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T1],#NFDB |
| 1439:That, surely, gives us a picture of a great deal that is happening at the present time. This is one of the problems confronting the Christian Church today. This ‘affluent society’ in which we are living is drugging people and making them feel that all is well with them. They have better wages, better houses, better cars, every gadget desirable in the home; life is satisfactory and all seems to be well; and because of that people have ceased to think and to face the real problems. They are content with this superficial ease and satisfaction, and that militates against a true and a radical understanding of their actual condition. And, of course, this is aggravated at the present time by many other agencies. There is the pleasure mania, and television and radio bringing their influence right into the home. All these things persuade man that all is well; they give him temporary feelings of happiness; and so he assumes that all is well and stops thinking. The result is that he does not realise his true position and then face it. ~ D Martyn Lloyd Jones, #NFDB |
1440:But...surely you know where your nephew is going?' she asked, looking bewildered.
'Certainly we know,' said Vernon Dursley. 'He's off with some of your lot, isn't he?
Right, Dudley, let's get in the car, you heard the man, we're in a hurry.'
Again, Vernon Dursley marched as far as the front door, but Dudley did not follow.
'Off with some of our lot?'
Hestia looked outraged. Harry had met the attitude before: witches and wizards seemed stunned that his closest living family took so little interest in the famous Harry Potter.
'It's fine,' Harry assured her. 'It doesn't matter, honestly.'
'Doesn't matter?' repeated Hestia, her voice rising ominously.
'Don't these people realise what you've been through? What danger you are in? The unique position you hold in the hearts of the anti-Voldemort movement?
'Er - no, they don't,' said Harry. 'They think I'm a waste of space, actually, but I'm used to -'
'I don't think you're a waste of space.'
If Harry had not seen Dudley's lips move, he might not have believed it. ~ J K Rowling,#NFDB |
1441:In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels."
"I hope so."
"Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery."
"Would you come and visit me there?"
"Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited."
"You don't want to discuss — you know — what happened? My priest said — "
"No."
"I care about how you are, I love you."
"You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone. ~ Iris Murdoch,#NFDB |
| 1442:The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realise how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought that life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day i would look back on my life and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate. ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd, #NFDB |
| 1443:But a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done and the way to do it and the result. And afterwards you will realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her, all your powers are hers, mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe. There can be no more happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress and suffering in the ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being, into its deep peace and its intense Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, 12, #NFDB |
| 1444:One only had to go to Kabul airport to see a classic example of the aid community helping itself rather than Afghans. The scariest part of going to Afghanistan was flying in from Dubai on the state airline Ariana. Its planes were in such bad condition that they were banned from most places on earth. Even the model plane in the sales office was held together by sticking plaster and elastic bands. The UN has its own airline to fly staff in and out of danger spots, so it quickly began its own service from Dubai or Islamabad to Kabul. As I stood nervously fiddling with my Ariana boarding pass, I would enviously watch the foreign aid workers and diplomats boarding the shiny UN planes. What I didn’t realise was that the millions of dollars to subsidise this service was coming from the money pledged to help Afghanistan. Ghani was indignant. ‘The first thing the UN system provided through the $1.6 billion of donor money channelled to UN agencies in 2002 was an airline devoted to serving UN staff, and occasionally (after much lobbying) some Afghan government officials.’ While ~ Christina Lamb, #NFDB |
| 1445:To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical men- tality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.01, #NFDB |
1446:On the left side of the balcony, at the rear just outside the open doorway through which I'm looking, I suddenly become aware of the presence of a figure. It is an imposing statue, about six feet high and apparently carved in one piece from some green stone - perhaps jade. The sculptor provided excellent detailing of fine robes, and a belt, and something - possibly a sword? - suspended from the belt.
At first this stunning piece of sculpture seems just that - a harmless, inanimate statue. I'm curious to see more of it and move my point of view a little closer to get to look at its face. To my surprise, the statue is half animal, half human. It has the body of a powerful and well-muscled man but the head of a crocodile, like Sobek, the ancient Egyptian crocodile god. And now I suddenly realise it is alive - a living being, a supernatural guardian. At this moment its eyes swivel sideways and it is looking at me, taking note of me.
The look is intelligent, appraising somehow sly, but yet not threatening. What is this living statue, this being of jade? The vision fades... ~ Graham Hancock,#NFDB |
| 1447:I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realising them. This is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all. to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realise that it is not. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB |
1448:I'm a writer and I'm feeling like death, as you would too if you'd just flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan at some ungodly hour of the morning only to discover that you can't get into your hotel room for another three hours. In fact it's enough just to have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, then please assume that I am just kidding. Anyone else will surely realise that I am not.
Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece. I don't know what it is, in fact. It's made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the trans-Siberian railway because when the Czar (I don't know which Czar it was because I am not in my study at home I'm leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB |
1449:I feel sorry for you, Task.’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘No, not because you’ve suffered, or you’re cursed, but because you don’t realise.’
He threw her a quizzical look.
Lesky reached out a hand and placed it on his stone. He tensed, but felt nothing, just the warmth of her skin.
‘You don’t realise how human you are. All of us. Alabast, Ellia, me, Huff, even you, with a mind made out of stone. We all walk around pretendin’ we’re not broken in some way. Most spend their lives hiding it. But we are broken. And you know what? That’s fine. In fact, it’s perfect because it’s imperfect. Each crack, each blemish, each scar, whether of the skin or in the mind, they make us whole. We’re made through livin’, not by bein’ born. What we learn is what shapes us. Some choose a friendly shape, others somethin’ more jagged and sharp. That is what it means to be human, Task. We can choose. You say your master made a mistake? Made you broken? I think he made the finest golem there is. One who’s more than stone, not just some mindless machine. One who can make actually make a choice for himself. One who’s got a conscience. A heart. ~ Ben Galley,#NFDB |
1450:Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is there consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of mans life with God, the conscious interchange. In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily, in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, -- in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there, -- or remains only for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Love,#NFDB |
1451:Heirloom
My grandmother,
wise even at eight,
hid under her bed
when her first suitor came home.
Grave and serene
her features, defined
as majestically as a head
on an old coin, I realise
through photographs, clouded
by the silt of seasons, like the patina
of age on Kanjeevaram silks,
that in her day, girls of eight didn’t
have broken teeth or grazed elbows.
Now in her kitchen,
she quietly stirs ancestral
aromas of warm coconut lullabies,
her voice tracing the familiar
mosaic of family fables, chipped
by repetition.
And yet,
in the languorous swirl
of sari, she carries the secret
of a world where nayikas still walk
with the liquid tread of those
who know their bodies as well
as they know their minds, still glide
down deserted streets - to meet
dark forbidden paramours whose eyes
smoulder like lanterns in winter and return before sunset, the flowers
in their hair radiating the perfume
of an unrecorded language of romance.
The secret of a world
that she refuses to bequeath
with her recipes
10
and her genes.
~ Arundhathi Subramaniam,#NFDB |
1452:We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us.
We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret. ~ Sara Baume,#NFDB |
1453:I’ve been absent from you too long. I miss you so badly and yet this being apart makes me realise you’re not simply the faithful man who loves me so astonishingly well, but an angel, sent for some unfathomable reason to look out for me. I should have realised this truth years ago because you are so extraordinary, so unlike other men, so unlike me, this weak, vain, faithless creature you have been so intent on saving from himself. I should have realised from the first moment I saw you in that trench, when I fell so badly in love with you and hoped you wouldn’t notice. Or perhaps not then, but later, when you saved my life so often just by lending me courage when I was half-mad from fear. How much courage you had to spare – I will never forget. But angels are courageous, aren’t they? I should know. I have never understood why I deserved such grace.
I don’t have your faith, Patrick, or your love of God. I am uncertain and afraid, I wish you were with me now, not just in spirit, as I know you are and always have been, but here in body. I need to cower behind you, because if God is real He might be kinder knowing you loved me.
If angels need to pray, pray for me. ~ Marion Husband,#NFDB |
| 1454:But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
| 1455:Have you ever noticed that the only people who go on about "homosexuality is a choice" is heterosexual Christians. This is quite revealing. Firstly they come to this conclusion because they already view same sex orientation as a sin and therefore, like their own sin, they can choose to sin or not. Secondly they lack understanding because they have never had to choose their orientation. It came naturally to them at puberty as orientation did to me. Trying to explain orientation to these people is like trying to explain white male privilege to a white male. They have known nothing else and never experienced discrimination, inequality or harassment as a female or having black skin. It's like trying to explain the concept of water to a gold fish. And they are completely oblivious to the fact that every moment of every day they are acting on their heterosexual orientation. Gay people get it because we've lived it.....and you never get hear gay people saying "I chose to be gay". You do sometimes get gay people saying they chose to be straight but on deeper examination you realise they are actually "situational heterosexuals" as their orientation has not changed; just some behaviours. ~ Anthony Venn Brown, #NFDB |
1456:The iron has entered my soul,' announced George Knox impressively. 'Let me tell you, my dear Laura, that when I lay here weak and ill, unable to raise a hand in my own defence, I begged for a nurse, a hireling who would do her day-labour as a machine, and not worry a sick, ageing man.
But even this was denied. Miss Grey, all kindness and sympathy and, I must say, Laura, an infernal bore, insisted on nursing me herself. Degrading enough in any case but the worst you have not heard. Could I ask my secretary to shave me? No.
As a matter of fact, I did, but she wouldn't, or couldn't. Imagine me, Laura, becoming more like a pard day by day prickly and revolting to myself, mortified beyond words to be seen in this this condition, but helpless.'
'Why didn't you get the gardener to do it? Or use a safety razor?'
'My dear Laura,' said George Knox in a hurt voice, 'you do not seem to realise how weak I was, how very weak. For two days my temperature had been over a hundred, and when the fever had left me I lay powerless, as a new-born babe, and the woman triumphed over me. She would not let me shave, she fed me on slops, she would not even give me clean pyjamas till the third day. ~ Angela Thirkell,#NFDB |
| 1457:Does the reader realise the despair that falls upon the hapless Catholic journalist at such moments; or how wild a prayer he may well send up for the intercession of St. Francis of Sales? What is he to say; or at what end of that sentence is he to begin? What is the good of his laboriously beginning to explain that a married clergy is a matter of discipline and not doctrine, that it can therefore be allowed locally without heresy--when all the time the man thinks a beard as important as a wife and more important than a false religion? What is the sense of explaining to him the peculiar historical circumstances that have led to preserving some local habits in Kiev or Warsaw, when the man at any moment may receive a mortal shock by seeing a bearded Franciscan walking through Wimbledon or Walham Green? What we want to get at is the mind of the man who can think so absurdly about us as to suppose we could have a horror of heresy, and then a weakness for heresy, and then a greater horror of hair. To what does he attribute all the inconsistent nonsense and inconsequent bathos that he associates with us? Does he think we are all joking; or all dreaming; or all out of our minds; or what does he think? ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB |
| 1458:God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else - something it never entered your head to conceive - comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
1459:the hard shell of the ego :::
This sense of one's own person becomes a kind of cage, a prison which shuts you in, prevents you from being true, from knowing truly, acting truly, understanding truly. It is as though someone had put you in a very hard shell and you were compelled to stay there.
This is the first sensation you have. Afterwards you begin to tap against the shell in order to break it. Sometimes it resists very long. But still, when you begin to feel this, that what you believed in to be yourself, the person doing thigns and for whom they are done, the person who exists and makes you what you are, yes, when you pass from this to the consciousness that this is a prison preventing you from being truly yourself, then you have made great progress, and there is hope. You feel yourself stifled, crushed, absolutely shut up in a prison without air, without light, without an opening, and then you begin pushing from the inside, pushing, pushing, pushing so that it may break.
And the day it breaks, the day it opens, suddenly, you enter the psychic consciousness. And then you understand. And then, truly, if you have a sense of humour, you laugh; you realise your stupidity. ~ The Mother,#NFDB |
1460:Looking at the works of art that are considered worthy of preservation in our Museums, and that were once the common objects of the market place, I could not but realise that a society can only be considered truly civilised when it is possible for every man to earn his living by the very work he would rather be doing than anything else in the world, a condition that has only been attained in social orders integrated on the basis of vocation, "svadharma".
At the same time I should like to emphasis that I have never built up a philosophy of my own or wished to establish a new school of thought. Perhaps the greatest thing I have learnt is never to think for myself; I fully agree with Andre Gide that "Toutes choses sont dites deja", and what I have sought is to understand what has been said, while taking no account of the "inferior philosophers". Holding with Heraclitus that the Word is common to all, and that Wisdom is to know the Will whereby all things are steered, I am convinced with Jeremias that the human cultures in all their apparent diversity are but the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit, that there is a "common universe of discourse" transcending the differences of tongues". ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy,#NFDB |
1461:My sweet mother, The more I look into myself, the more discouraged I am, and I don't know whether there is any chance of my making any progress. It seems that all the obscurities and falsehoods are rising up on every side, inside and outside, and want to swallow me up. There are times when I cannot distinguish truth from falsehood and I am then on the verge of losing my mind.
Still, there is something in me which says very weakly that all will be well; but this voice is so feeble that I cannot rely on it.1
My faults are so numerous and so great that I think I shall fail. On the other hand, I have neither the inclination nor the capacity for the ordinary life. And I know that I shall never be able to leave this life. This is my situation right now. The struggle is getting more and more acute, and worst of all I cannot lie to you. What should I do?
Do not torment yourself, my child, and remain as quiet as you can; do not yield to the temptation to give up the struggle and let yourself fall into darkness. Persist, and one day you will realise that I am close to you to console you and help you, and then the hardest part will be over. With all my love and blessings. 25 September 1947
~ The Mother, Some Answers From The Mother,#NFDB |
1462:Have you ever noticed that the only people who go on about "homosexuality is a choice" is heterosexual Christians. This is quite revealing. Firstly they come to this conclusion because they already view same sex orientation as a sin and therefore, like their own sin, they can choose to sin or not. Secondly they lack understanding because they have never had to choose their orientation. It came naturally to them at puberty as orientation did to me.
Trying to explain orientation to these people is like trying to explain white male privilege to a white male. They have known nothing else and never experienced discrimination, inequality or harassment as a female or having black skin. It's like trying to explain the concept of water to a gold fish. And they are completely oblivious to the fact that every moment of every day they are acting on their heterosexual orientation. Gay people get it because we've lived it.....and you never get hear gay people saying "I chose to be gay".
You do sometimes get gay people saying they chose to be straight because they are now married but on deeper examination you realise they are actually "situational heterosexuals" as their orientation has not changed; just some behaviours. ~ Anthony Venn Brown,#NFDB |
| 1463:If you are interested enough to have read thus far you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord’s Prayer. Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not a being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it. Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |
1464:A marriage is hard work and sometimes it's a bit of a bore. It's like housework. It's never finished. You've just got to grit your teeth and keep working away at it, day after day. Of course, the men don't work as hard at it as we do, but that's men for you, isn't it? They're not much good at housework either. Well, they weren't in my day. Of course, these days they cook, vacuum, change nappies — the lot! Still don't get equal pay in the workforce, though, do you? You've got a long way to go, you girls. Not doing much about it, though, are you?'
'Yes, OK, Aunt Connie, but the thing is I'm not interested in marriage in general. I'm interested in Alice and Jack's marriage. How would you describe it? Ordinary? Extraordinary? Cast your mind back! Even the tiniest detail would be helpful. Did they love each other, do you think?'
'Love! Pfff! I'll tell you something, something important. Write this down. You ready?' 'Yes, yes, I'm ready.'
'Love is a decision.'
'Love is a decision?'
'That's right. A decision. Not a feeling. That's what you young people don't realise. That's why you're always off divorcing each other. No offence, dear. Now, turn that silly tape-recorder off and I'll make you some cinnamon toast. ~ Liane Moriarty,#NFDB |
| 1465:AWAKENING To open both your drowsy eyes, To stretch your limbs and realise That day is here. To watch the dancing, shifting beam Of sun, awake yet half in dream, Uncertain if the fitful gleam Be far or near. To turn with soft, contented sigh, And through the window watch the sky, All opal blue. To feel the air steal in the room, Made fragrant by the soft perfume Of lime-trees, when their scented bloom Is damp with dew. To hear the rustling voice of leaves, The chirp of birds beneath the eaves, But now awake. The tiny hum of timid things That fly with gauzy, fragile wings, Where yet the dusk to daylight clings, When mornings break. To feel the soul look forth and smile, Contented with each fruitful mile That it beholds. To hear the heart beat loud and strong, In unison with Nature's song, That echoes tremulous and long While dawn unfolds. To know yourself a thing complete, With strength of mind and limb replete, With vast desire; A creature made to dominate The lesser things of earth, a fate On whom the universe must wait, With force entire. And then to cry in deep delight God made the world and made it right; Dear Heaven above! Was ere completeness so complete, Was ever sweetness half so sweet, Was ever loving half so meet; Thank God for love. ~ Radclyffe Hall, #NFDB |
| 1466:We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone. ~ Irvine Welsh, #NFDB |
| 1467:I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure. ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB |
1468:The great fault of modern democracy -- a fault that is common to the capitalist and the socialist -- is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness....
The great curse of our modern society is not so much lack of money as the fact that the lack of money condemns a man to a squalid and incomplete existence. But even if he has money, and a great deal of it, he is still in danger of leading an incomplete and cramped life, because our whole social order is directed to economic instead of spiritual ends. The economic view of life regards money as equivalent to satisfaction. Get money, and if you get enough of it you will get everything else that is worth having. The Christian view of life, on the other hand, puts economic things in second place. First seek the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added to you. And this is not so absurd as it sounds, for we have only to think for a moment to realise that the ills of modern society do not spring from poverty in fact, society today is probably richer in material wealth than any society that has ever existed. What we are suffering from is lack of social adjustment and the failure to subordinate material and economic goods to human and spiritual ones. ~ Christopher Henry Dawson,#NFDB |
1469:Truly speaking, I have no opinion. According to a vision of truth, everything is still terribly mixed, a more or less favourable combination of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, and so long as decisions are made and action is undertaken according to opinions, it will always be like that.
We want to give the example of an action that is undertaken in accordance with a vision of truth, but unfortunately we are still very far from realising this ideal, and even if the vision of truth expresses itself, it is immediately distorted in its implementation.
So, in the present state of affairs, it is impossible to say, "This is true and that is false, this leads us away from the goal and that brings us nearer the goal."
Everything can be used for the progress to be made; everything can be useful if we know how to use it.
The important thing is never to lose sight of the ideal we want to realise and to make use of all circumstances in view of this goal.
And finally, it is always better not to make an arbitrary decision for or against things, and to watch the unfolding of events with the impartiality of a witness, relying on the Divine Wisdom which will decide for the best and do what is necessary. 29 July 1961 ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother I, [T8],#NFDB |
1470:Homophobia and the closet are allies. Like an unhealthy co-dependent relationship they need each other to survive. One plays the victim living in fear and shame while the other plays the persecutor policing what is ‘normal’. The only way to dismantle homophobia is for every gay man and lesbian in the world to come out and live authentic lives. Once they realise how normal we are and see themselves in us….the controversy is over.
It is interesting to think what would happen though....on a particularly pre-determined day that every single gay man and lesbian came out. Imagine the impact when, on that day, people all around the world suddenly discovered their bosses, mums, dads, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, doctors, neighbours, colleagues, politicians, their favourite actors, celebrities and sports heroes, the people they loved and respected......were indeed gay.
All stereotypes would immediately be broken.....just by the same single act of millions of people…..and at last there would no longer be need for secrecy. The closet would become the lounge room. How much healthier would we be emotionally and psychologically when we could all be ourselves doing life without the internal and societal negatives that have been attached to our sexual orientation. ~ Anthony Venn Brown,#NFDB |
| 1471:External worship, material worship," say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised." Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the Sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine." But he does not abuse any one's idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life. "The child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin? If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB |
| 1472:One of the central tenets of the Western worldview is that one should always be engaged in some kind of outward task. Thus, the Westerner structures his time—including, sometimes, even his leisure time—as a series of discrete programmed activities which he must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or virtual list. One need only observe the expression on his face as he ploughs through yet another family outing, cultural event, or gruelling exercise routine to realise that his aim in life is not so much to live in the present moment as it is to work down a never-ending list. If one asks him how he is doing, he is most likely to respond with an artificial smile, and something along the lines of, ‘Fine, thank you – very busy of course!’ In many cases, he is not fine at all, but confused, exhausted, and fundamentally unhappy. In contrast, most people living in a country such as Kenya in Africa do not share in the Western worldview that it is noble or worthwhile to spend all of one’s time rushing around from one task to the next. When Westerners go to Kenya and do as they are wont to do, they are met with peels of laughter and cries of ‘mzungu’, which is Swahili for ‘Westerner’. The literal translation of ‘mzungu’ is ‘one who moves around’, ‘to go round and round’, or ‘to turn around in circles’. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB |
1473:No...I knew a Martin.
And was he wiley?
If there was one thing he wasn't was wiley, John.
Oh?
Poor Martin was an inordinately stupid man. He could barely tie his shoelaces.
A ha'penny short?
Ah listen. Martin kept animals had more wile in them.
What kind of animals?
He'd sheep. A few cattle, I suppose. Though they'd have been wind-bothered up that way.
They'd have been...
Bothered, John. By the wind coming in. The way it would unseat cattle.
Unseat them?
Cornelius lowers his sad eyes -
In the mind.
You mean you'd have a cow'd take a turn?
Cornelius squares his jaw.
Do you realise you're looking at a man who's seen a cow step in front of a moving vehicle? Purposefully.
On account of?
Wind coming easterly. That's the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you'd get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn't be right after it. ~ Kevin Barry,#NFDB |
| 1474:He rubbed his chin. “Then you have to believe that living as a Christian is in itself good. That renunciation, not succumbing to sin, has a value for human beings even in this earthly life. On a similar theme, I’ve read that sportsmen find the pain and effort of training meaningful in itself, even if they never win anything. If heaven didn’t actually exist, then at least we have a good, secure life as Christians, where we work, live happily, accept the possibilities God and nature give us, and look after each other. Do you know what my father—also a preacher—used to say about Læstadianism? That if you only counted the people the movement had saved from alcoholism and broken homes, that alone would justify what we do, even if we were preaching a lie.” He paused for a minute. “But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it costs more than it should to live according to Scripture. The way it did for Lea…The way I, in my delusion, forced Lea to live.” There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It took me many years to realise it, but no one should be forced by their father to live in a marriage like that, with a man they hate, a man who had taken them by force.” He raised his head and looked at the crucifix above us. “Yes, I remain convinced that it was right according to Scripture, but sometimes salvation can have too high a price. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB |
| 1475:Have you been travelling, my young friend? Come in out of the darkness and rain. Sit by the fire, eat, drink and rest yourself. Life is one long journey from beginning to end, you know. We all walk different roads, both with our bodies and our minds. Some of us lose heart and fall by the wayside, whilst others go on to realise their dreams and desires. Let me tell you a story of travellers, and the paths they followed. Of young ones, like yourself, sometimes uncertain of their direction, and often reluctant to listen to the voices of sense and wisdom. Of a mighty warrior, set on a course of destiny and vengeance, unstoppable in his resolve. Of an evil one and his crew, cruel and ruthless, bound on a march of destruction and conquest. Of a simple maid and her friends, homebodies whose only aims were peace and well-being for all. Of wicked, foolish wanderers, chasing fantasies and fables, consumed by their own greed. Of small babes who dreamed small dreams, not knowing what the future held in store for them. And, finally, of two friends, faithful and true, who had roamed many highways and together chose their own way. The lives I will tell you of are intertwined by fate—good and evil bringing their just rewards to each, as they merited them. Listen whilst I relate this story. For am I not the Teller of Tales, the Weaver of Dreams! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB |
| 1476:The bell of Limehouse Church rang as each of them, in this house, drifted into sleep - suddenly once more like children who, exhausted by the day's adventures, fall asleep quickly and carelessly. A solitary visitor, watching them as they slept, might wonder how it was that they had arrived at such a state and might speculate about each stage of their journey towards it: when did he first start muttering to himself, and not realise that he was doing so? When did she first begin to shy away from others and seek the shadows? When did all of them come to understand that whatever hopes they might have had were foolish, and that life was something only to be endured? Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear: the four people gathered in this house by the church had passed into a place, one might almost say a time, from which there was no return. The young man who had been bent over the fire had spent his life in a number of institutions - an orphanage, a juvenile home and most recently a prison; the old woman still clutching the brown bottle was an alcoholic who had abandoned her husband and two children many years before; the old man had taken to wandering after the death of his wife in a fire which he believed, at the time, he might have prevented. And what of Ned, who was now muttering in his sleep? ~ Peter Ackroyd, #NFDB |
1477:why could it not be that God allowed evil because it will bring us all to a far greater glory and joy than we would have had otherwise? Isn't it possible that the eventual glory and joy we will know will be infinitely greater than it would have been had there been no evil? What if that future world will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost?
At the simplest level, we know that only if there is danger can there be courage. Apart from sin and evil, we would never have seen the courage of God, or the astonishing extent of his love, or the glory of a deity who lays aside his glory and goes to the cross. For us here in this life, the thought of God's glory is rather remote and abstract. But we must realise that the most rapturous delights you have ever had- in the beauty of a landscape, or in the pleasure of food, or in the fulfillment of a loving embrace- are like dewdrops compared to the bottomless ocean of joy that it will be to see God face-to-face (1 John 3:1-3). That is what we are in for, nothing less. And according to the Bible, that glorious beauty, and our enjoyment of it, has been immeasurably enhanced by Christ's redemption of us from evil and death. We are told that the angels long to endlessly gaze into the gospel, into the wonder of what Jesus did in his incarnation and atonement (1 Peter 1:12) ~ Timothy J Keller,#NFDB |
1478:How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?
Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.
Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down. ~ Michael Marshall Smith,#NFDB |
| 1479:The suffering or the bad memories are as important as the good memories, and the good experiences. If you sort of, can imagine life as being 99% of the time quite linear, and most of the time you're in a state of neither happiness nor sadness. And then that 1% of the time you experience moments of very crystalised happiness, or crystalised sadness, or loneliness or depression. And I believe all of those moments are very pertinant. It's like I said to you, that for me it's mostly those crystalised moments of melancholy which are more inspirational to me. And in a strange way they become quite beautiful in their own way. Music that is sad, melancholic, depressing, is in a kind of perverse way more uplifting. I find happy music extremely depressing, mostly - mostly quite depressing. It's particularly this happy music that has no spirituality behind it - if it's just sort of mindless party music, it'd be quite depressing. But largely speaking, I was the kind of person that responds more to melancholia, and it makes me feel good. And I think the reason for this is, I think if you respond strongly to that kind of art, it's because in a way it makes you feel like you're not alone. So when we hear a very sad song, it makes us realise that we do share this kind of common human experience, and we're all kind of bonded in sadness and melancholia and depression. ~ Steven John Wilson, #NFDB |
1480:keep faith :::
We must have faith that always what is for the best happens. We may for the moment not consider it as the best because we are ignorant and also blind, because we do not see the consequences of things and what will happen later. But we must keep the faith that if it is like that, if we rely on the Divine, if we give Him the full charge of ourselves, if we let Him decide everything for us, well, we must know that it is always what is best for us that happens. This is an absolute fact. To the extent to which you surrender, the best happens to you. This may not be in conformity with what you would like, your preferences or desire, because these things are blind: it is the best from thespiritual point of view, the best for your progress, your development, your spiritual growth, your true life. It is always that. And you must keep this faith, because faith is the expression of a trust in the Divine and the full self-giving you make to the Divine. And when you make it, it is something absolutely marvellous. That's a fact, these are not just words, you understand, it is a fact. When you look back, all kinds of things which you did not understand when they happened to you, you realise as just the thing which was necessary in order to compel you to make the needed progress. Always, without exception. It is our blindness which prevents us from seeing it. ~ The Mother,#NFDB |
1481:the fourth aid, time, kala :::
The sadhaka who has all these aids is sure of his goal. Even a fall will be for him only a means of rising and death a passage towards fulfilment. For once on this path, birth and death become only processes in the development of his being and the stages of his journey.
Time is the remaining aid needed for the effectivity of the process. Time presents itself to human effort as an enemy or a friend, as a resistance, a medium or an instrument. But always it is really the instrument of the soul.
Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression whose course it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument. Therefore, while our effort is personal, Time appears as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the forces that conflict with our own. When the divine working and the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a medium and a condition. When the two become one, it appears as a servant and instrument.
The ideal attitude of the sadhaka towards Time is to have an endless patience as if he had all eternity for his fulfilment and yet to develop the energy that shall realise now and with an ever-increasing mastery and pressure of rapidity till it reaches the miraculous instantaneousness of the supreme divine Transformation.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids,#NFDB |
1482:
If one is too serious in yoga, doesn't one become obsessed by the difficulty of the task?
There is a limit to be kept!... But if one chooses one's obsession well, it may be very useful because it is no longer quite an obsession. For example, one has decided to find the Divine within oneself, and constantly, in every circumstance, whatever happens or whatever one may do, one concentrates in order to enter into contact with the inner Divine. Naturally, first one must have that little thing Sri Aurobindo speaks about, that "lesser truth" which consists in knowing that there is a Divine within one (this is a very good example of the "lesser truth") and once one is sure of it and has the aspiration to find it, if that aspiration becomes constant and the effort to realise it becomes constant, in the eyes of others it looks like an obsession, but this kind of obsession is not bad. It becomes bad only if one loses one's balance. But it must be made quite clear that those who lose their balance with that obsession are only those who were quite ready to lose their balance; any circumstance whatever would have produced the same result and made them lose their balance - it is a defect in the mental structure, it is not the fault of the obsession. And naturally, he who changes a desire into an obsession would be sure to go straight towards imbalance. That is why I say it is important to know the object of the obsession. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951,#NFDB |
1483:Here the formula of the supreme knowledge comes to our help; we have nothing to do in our essential standpoint with these distinctions, for there is no I nor thou, but only one divine Self equal in all embodiments, equal in the individual and the group, and to realise that, to express that, to serve that, to fulfil that is all that matters. Self-satisfaction and altruism, enjoyment and indifference are not the essential thing. If the realisation, fulfilment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic sense or seems egoistic enjoyment and self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment works often with great subtlety; we prefer and put on almost unconsciously the garb which will look best in the eye that regards us from outside and we allow a veil to drop over the eye within; we are impelled to drape ourselves in the vow of poverty, or in the garb of service, or in outward proofs of indifference and renunciation and a spotless sainthood because that is what tradition and opinion demand of us and so we can make best an impression on our environment. But all this is vanity and delusion. We may be called upon to assume these things, for that may be the uniform of our service; but equally it may not. The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB |
1484:When, then, by the withdrawal of the centre of consciousness from identification with the mind, life and body, one has discovered ones true self, discovered the oneness of that self with the pure, silent, immutable Brahman, discovered in the immutable, in the Akshara Brahman, that by which the individual being escapes from his own personality into the impersonal, the first movement of the Path of Knowledge has been completed. It is the sole that is absolutely necessary for the traditional aim of the Yoga of Knowledge, for immergence, for escape from cosmic existence, for release into the absolute and ineffable Parabrahman who is beyond all cosmic being. The seeker of this ultimate release may take other realisations on his way, may realise the Lord of the universe, the Purusha who manifests Himself in all creatures, may arrive at the cosmic consciousness, may know and feel his unity with all beings; but these are only stages or circumstances of his journey, results of the unfolding of his soul as it approaches nearer the ineffable goal. To pass beyond them all is his supreme object. When on the other hand, having attained to the freedom and the silence and the peace, we resume possession by the cosmic consciousness of the active as well as the silent Brahman and can securely live in the divine freedom as well as rest in it, we have completed the second movement of the Path by which the integrality of self-knowledge becomes the station of the liberated soul.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB |
| 1485:My advice would be to find a good woman and steer well clear of the whole bloody business, and it’s a shame no one told me the same twenty years ago.” He looked sideways at Jezal. “But if, say, you’re stuck out on some great wide plain in the middle of nowhere and can’t avoid it, there’s three rules I’d take to a fight. First, always do your best to look the coward, the weakling, the fool. Silence is a warrior’s best armour, the saying goes. Hard looks and hard words have never won a battle yet, but they’ve lost a few.” “Look the fool, eh? I see.” Jezal had built his whole life around trying to appear the cleverest, the strongest, the most noble. It was an intriguing idea, that a man might choose to look like less than he was. “Second, never take an enemy lightly, however much the dullard he seems. Treat every man like he’s twice as clever, twice as strong, twice as fast as you are, and you’ll only be pleasantly surprised. Respect costs you nothing, and nothing gets a man killed quicker than confidence.” “Never underestimate the foe. A wise precaution.” Jezal was beginning to realise that he had underestimated this Northman. He wasn’t half the idiot he appeared to be. “Third, watch your opponent as close as you can, and listen to opinions if you’re given them, but once you’ve got your plan in mind, you fix on it and let nothing sway you. Time comes to act, you strike with no backwards glances. Delay is the parent of disaster, my father used to tell me, and believe me, I’ve seen some disasters. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB |
| 1486:My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure. ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB |
| 1487:Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well. The scale of this spend is fascinating in itself, when you put it in the context of what we all expect from evidence-based medicine, which is that people will simply use the best treatment for the patient. Because when you pull away from the industry’s carefully fostered belief that this marketing activity is all completely normal, and stop thinking of drugs as being a consumer product like clothes or cosmetics, you suddenly realise that medicines marketing only exists for one reason. In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine. ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB |
1488:Mathematicians still don’t understand
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,
on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out
over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:
Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I’m that driver. All night
I’ve swallowed you in the bar.
Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried
raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know
where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I’ll never return to.
The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you
away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and
blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel,#NFDB |
1489:Why Ubuntu: If I were you I'd just install Ubuntu into a dual-boot partition (the Ubuntu website has instructions for this) and learn as you go. Ubuntu is similar enough to Windows that you should be able to start using it right away without much difficulty.
For running your Python scripts you'll want to drop into the shell (Ctrl + Alt + T If memory serves me right). As you become more comfortable with Ubuntu, you can start using the shell more and more. The shell is what gives you access to the power of Unix; every time you need to do something tedious and repetitive, try to find out how to do it through the shell.
Eventually you will find yourself using the shell constantly. You'll wonder how you ever managed without it, and deride other operating systems for their lack of sensible programming tools. One day you'll realise that desktop window managers are a needless distraction. You start using xmonad or awesomewm. Eventually you realise that this, too, is a bastardisaton of the Unix vision and start using tmux exclusively. Then suddenly it hits you - every computer, every operating system, no matter how insignificant or user-friendly, has the Unix nature. All of them are merely streams from where you can ssh back into the ocean of Unix. Having achieved enlightenment you are equally content using an iPad as your main work computer, using powershell in Windows or SSH into a Digital Ocean droplet from your parent's computer. This is the Zen of Unix.
~ JohnyTex, https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/38zytg/is_it_worth_my_time_to_learn_linux_while_learning,#NFDB |
| 1490:The fact is that men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed; and in bad faith they use it as a pretext to declare that woman wanted the destiny they imposed on her. We have seen that in reality her whole education conspires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure; all of society - beginning with her respected parents - lies to her in extolling the high value of love, devotion, and the gift of self and in concealing the fact that neither lover, husband nor children will be disposed to bear the burdensome responsibility of it. She cheerfully accepts these lies because they invite her to take the easy slope: and that is the worst of the crimes committed against her; from her childhood and throughout her life, she is spoiled, she is corrupted by the fact that this resignation, tempting to any existent anxious about her freedom, is mean to be her vocation; if one encourages a child to be lazy by entertaining him all day, without giving him the occasion to study, without showing him its value, no one will say when he reaches the age of man that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; this is how the woman is raised, without ever being taught the necessity of assuming her own existence; she readily lets herself count on the protection, love, help and guidance of others; she lets herself be fascinated by the hope of being able to realise her being without doing anything. She is wrong to yield to this temptation; but the man is ill advised to reproach her for it since it is he himself who tempted her. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB |
1491:Some young men who had come with an introduction from the Ramakrishna Mission at Madras asked Bhagavan, “Which is the proper path for us to follow?”
Bhagavan: When you speak of a path, where are you now? and where do you want to go? If these are known, then we can talk of the path. Know first where you are and what you are. There is nothing to be reached. You are always as you really are. But you don’t realise it. That is all.
A little while after, one of the visitors asked Bhagavan, “I am now following the path of japa. Is that all right?”
Bhagavan: Yes. It is quite good. You can continue in that. The gentleman who asked about creation said, “I never thought I was going to have the good fortune of visiting Bhagavan. But circumstances have brought me here and I find in his presence, without any effort on my part, I am having santi. Apparently, getting peace does not depend on our effort.
It seems to come only as the result of grace!” Bhagavan was silent. Meanwhile, another visitor remarked, “No. Our effort is also necessary, though no one can do without grace.” After some time, Bhagavan remarked, “Mantra japa, after a time, leads to a stage when you become Mantra maya i.e., you become that whose name you have been repeating or chanting.
First you repeat the mantra by mouth; later you do it mentally.
First, you do this dhyana with breaks. Later, you do it without any break. At that stage you realise you do dhyana without any effort on your part, that dhyana is your real nature. Till then, effort is necessary.” ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day By Day, ,#NFDB |
| 1492:Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, "Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it]," the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man's life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while. ~ Marie Louise von Franz, #NFDB |
1493:It goes something like this. You're walking along minding your own business, or you're on the underground or you're on a bus or something, but generally you're not paying much attention. And suddenly you look around and see all these other people and think, Hey, they can look at me and see me and I can see in my mind what I think they see, and when I'm gone they're going to keep on walking and theyr'e going to go and live their lives, and their thoughts are going to be just like mine, but different, but real and solid and alive and full of feeling and confusion and colour just like life, and, hey, isnt that cool! And it is.
And roughly around this time you're going to notice that you can feel trains under your feet or pipes bubbling, and you can hear the sound of traffic and voices and stuff; and then you'll probably look up at the things around you and think, Those buildings with the lights on look almost alive, like giant trees lit up with their own constellation of stars in every window, or maybe not if you're underground; and you'll realise that you can see the city all around, and it's so full of lives and life, and they're all buzzing around you, and every single individual is real and alive and passionate and full of mystery, and it's not just Joe Bloggs walking by who's like this, but that every part of the city is crawling with life. And you'll think, Hey, that's pretty damn sweet, everywhere I look there's life, and roughly around that point you'll realise you can hear rats and pigeons and thoughts and spells and colours and electricity, and that's probably when you started going a bit mad. ~ Kate Griffin,#NFDB |
1494:
How can one "learn of pure delight"?
First of all, to begin with, one must through an attentive observation grow aware that desires and the satisfaction of desires give only a vague, uncertain pleasure, mixed, fugitive and altogether unsatisfactory. That is usually the starting-point.
Then, if one is a reasonable being, one must learn to discern what is desire and refrain from doing anything that may satisfy one's desires. One must reject them without trying to satisfy them. And so the first result is exactly one of the first observations stated by the Buddha in his teaching: there is an infinitely greater delight in conquering and eliminating a desire than in satisfying it. Every sincere and steadfast seeker will realise after some time, sooner or later, at times very soon, that this is an absolute truth, and that the delight felt in overcoming a desire is incomparably higher than the small pleasure, so fleeting and mixed, which may be found in the satisfaction of his desires. That is the second step.
Naturally, with this continuous discipline, in a very short time the desires will keep their distance and will no longer bother you. So you will be free to enter a little more deeply into your being and open yourself in an aspiration to... the Giver of Delight, the divine Element, the divine Grace. And if this is done with a sincere self-giving - something that gives itself, offers itself and expects nothing in exchange for its offering - one will feel that kind of sweet warmth, comfortable, intimate, radiant, which fills the heart and is the herald of Delight.
After this, the path is easy.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#NFDB |
1495:Thoughts are forms and have an individual life, independent of their author: sent out from him into the world, they move in it towards the realisation of their own purpose of existence. When you think of anyone, your thought takes a form and goes out to find him; and, if your thinking is associated with some will that is behind it, the thought-form that has gone out from you makes an attempt to realise itself. Let us say, for instance, that you have a keen desire for a certain person to come and that, along with this vital impulse of desire, a strong imagination accompanies the mental form you have made; you imagine, "If he came, it would be like this or it would be like that." After a time you drop the idea altogether, and you do not know that even after you have forgotten it, your thought continues to exist. For it does still exist and is in action, independent of you, and it would need a great power to bring it back from its work. It is working in the atmosphere of the person touched by it and creates in him the desire to come. And if there is a sufficient power of will in your thought-form, if it is a well-built formation, it will arrive at its own realisation. But between the formation and the realisation there is a certain lapse of time, and if in this interval your mind has been occupied with quite other things, then when there happens this fulfilment of your forgotten thought, you may not even remember that you once harboured it; you do not know that you were the instigator of its action and the cause of what has come about. And it happens very often too that when the result does come, you have ceased to desire or care for it.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#NFDB |
1496:
Why do some children take interest in things only when there is some excitement?
They are tamasic. It is due to the large proportion of tamas in their nature. The more tamasic one is, the more does one need something violent and exciting circumstances. When the physical is tamasic, unless one eats spices and highly flavoured food, one does not feel nourished. And yet these are poisons. They act exactly like poison on the nerves. They do not nourish. But it is because people are tamasic, because their body's consciousness is not sufficiently developed. Well, mentally it is the same thing, vitally the same thing. If they are tamasic, they always need new excitements, dramas, murders, suicides, etc. to feel anything at all, otherwise.... And there is nothing, nothing that makes one more wicked and cruel than tamas. For it is this need of excitement which shakes you up a little, makes you come out of yourself. And one must also learn, there, to distinguish between those who are exclusively tamasic and those who are mixed, and those who are struggling within themselves with their different parts. One can, one must know in what proportion their nature is constituted, so as to be able to insist at need on one thing or another. Some people constantly need a whipping from life in order to move, otherwise they would spend their time sleeping. Others, on the contrary, need soothing things, silence, a retreat in the country-side - all things that do a lot of good but which must disappear as soon as one needs to make an effort for progress or to realise something or struggle against a defect, conquer an obstacle.... It is complicated, don't you think so? ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#NFDB |
1497:Dearest Mac,
I love you. I will always love you.
But I can live with you no longer. I've tried to be strong for you, for three years I have tried. I have failed. You tried to remake me in your image, dear Mac, and I tried to be what you wanted, but I no longer can. I am sorry.
I want to write that my heart is breaking, but it is not. It broke some time ago, and I have just now realised that I can leave me heartbreak behind and go on.
The decision to live without you was a painful one and not lightly made. I realise you can legally cause me much harm for taking this step, and I ask you, for the love we once shared, not to. It could be that I will not need to leave forever, but I know that I need time apart, alone, to heal.
You have explained that you sometimes leave me for my own good, so I will have a chance to recover from life with you. Now I am doing the same, leaving so that both of us have a chance to breath, a chance to cool. Living with you is like being with a shooting star, one that burns so brightly that it scorches me. And I am watching the star burn out. In the end, Mac, I fear there will be nothing left of you.
I know you will be angry when you read this, because you can grow so angry! But when you stop being angry, you will realize that my decision is sound. Together, we are destroying each other. Apart, I can remember my love for you. But you are burning me. You have exhausted me, and I have nothing left to give.
Ian has agreed to bring this letter to you, and he will inform me of what steps you decide to take. I trust Ian to help us through. Please do not try to seek me yourself.
I love you, Mac. I will always love you.
Please be well.
Isabella ~ Jennifer Ashley,#NFDB |
1498:We believe in the wrong things. That's what frustrates me the most . Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong. It's not going to be explained to you in a prayer. And I'm not going to be able to explain it to you. Not because I'm as ignorant and hopeful and selectively blind as the next guy, but because I don't think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand it on your own. It's like when you're starting to read. First, you learn the letters. Then, once you know what sounds the letters make you use them to sound out words. You know that c-a-t leads to cat and d-o-g leads to dog. But then you have to make that extra leap, to understand that the word, the sound, the "cat" is connected to an actual cat, and that "dog" is connected to an actual dog. It's that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning. And a lot of the time in life, we're still just sounding things out. We know the sentences and how to say them. We know the ideas and how to present them. We know the prayers and which words to say in what order. but that's only spelling.
I don't mean this to sound hopeless. Because in the same way that a kid can realise what "c-a-t" means, I think we can find the truths that live behind our words. I wish that I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learnt the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily. ~ Rachel Cohn,#NFDB |
1499:One must act radically. When one pulls out a tooth, one does it with a single tug, and the pain quickly goes away. The Jew must clear out of Europe. Otherwise no understanding will be possible between Europeans. It's the Jew who prevents everything. When I think about it, I realise that I'm extraordinarily humane. At the time of the rule of the Popes, the Jews were mistreated in Rome. Until 1830, eight Jews mounted on donkeys were led once a year through the streets of Rome. For my part, I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. If they break their pipes on the journey, I can't do anything about it. But if they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution but extermination. Why should I look at a Jew through other eyes than if he were a Russian prisoner-of-war? In the p.o.w. camps, many are dying. It's not my fault. I didn't want either the war or the p.o.w. camps. Why did the Jew provoke this war?
A good three hundred or four hundred years will go by before the Jews set foot again in Europe. They'll return first of all as commercial travellers, then gradually they'll become emboldened to settle here—the better to exploit us. In the next stage, they become philanthropists, they endow foundations. When a Jew does that, the thing is particularly noticed—for it's known that they're dirty dogs. As a rule, it's the most rascally of them who do that sort of thing. And then you'll hear these poor Aryan boobies telling you : "You see, there are good Jews !"
Let's suppose that one day National Socialism will undergo a change, and become used by a caste of privileged persons who exploit the people and cultivate money. One must hope that in that case a new reformer will arise and clean up the stables. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB |
| 1500:Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have though much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else -something it never entered your head to conceive- comes crasing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB |