classes ::: adjective,
children :::
branches ::: undeniable

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object:undeniable
word class:adjective

see also :::

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Heart_of_Matter
Modern_Man_in_Search_of_a_Soul
Process_and_Reality
The_Seals_of_Wisdom
Toward_the_Future

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0.05_-_Letters_to_a_Child
0_1961-03-14
0_1961-06-27
0_1961-07-15
0_1962-02-27
0_1964-11-28
0_1965-05-19
0_1965-05-29
0_1965-09-15a
0_1965-09-15b
0_1966-10-08
0_1967-05-20
0_1968-10-26
1.01_-_Adam_Kadmon_and_the_Evolution
1.01_-_A_NOTE_ON_PROGRESS
1.01_-_Historical_Survey
1.02_-_SOCIAL_HEREDITY_AND_PROGRESS
1.02_-_The_Pit
1.02_-_The_Vision_of_the_Past
1.03_-_THE_GRAND_OPTION
1.03_-_The_Phenomenon_of_Man
1.04_-_SOME_REFLECTIONS_ON_PROGRESS
1.04_-_The_Aims_of_Psycho_therapy
1.04_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda
1.04_-_The_Self
1.07_-_A_Song_of_Longing_for_Tara,_the_Infallible
1.07_-_Medicine_and_Psycho_therapy
1.07_-_The_Literal_Qabalah_(continued)
1.1.01_-_The_Divine_and_Its_Aspects
1.1.02_-_Sachchidananda
1.10_-_Aesthetic_and_Ethical_Culture
1.10_-_On_our_Knowledge_of_Universals
1.11_-_FAITH_IN_MAN
1.16_-_THE_ESSENCE_OF_THE_DEMOCRATIC_IDEA
1.19_-_ON_THE_PROBABLE_EXISTENCE_AHEAD_OF_US_OF_AN_ULTRA-HUMAN
1.63_-_The_Interpretation_of_the_Fire-Festivals
1.74_-_Obstacles_on_the_Path
1955-10-26_-_The_Divine_and_the_universal_Teacher_-_The_power_of_the_Word_-_The_Creative_Word,_the_mantra_-_Sound,_music_in_other_worlds_-_The_domains_of_pure_form,_colour_and_ideas
1956-01-04_-_Integral_idea_of_the_Divine_-_All_things_attracted_by_the_Divine_-_Bad_things_not_in_place_-_Integral_yoga_-_Moving_idea-force,_ideas_-_Consequences_of_manifestation_-_Work_of_Spirit_via_Nature_-_Change_consciousness,_change_world
1957-12-18_-_Modern_science_and_illusion_-_Value_of_experience,_its_transforming_power_-_Supramental_power,_first_aspect_to_manifest
1962_02_27
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Call_of_Cthulhu
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Case_of_Charles_Dexter_Ward
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Dreams_in_the_Witch_House
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Last_Test
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_out_of_Time
1.jlb_-_Plainness
1.jlb_-_Simplicity
1.poe_-_Eureka_-_A_Prose_Poem
1.whitman_-_Carol_Of_Words
1.whitman_-_I_Sing_The_Body_Electric
1.whitman_-_Song_Of_The_Open_Road
2.03_-_DEMETER
2.03_-_The_Christian_Phenomenon_and_Faith_in_the_Incarnation
2.03_-_THE_ENIGMA_OF_BOLOGNA
2.05_-_The_Cosmic_Illusion;_Mind,_Dream_and_Hallucination
2.07_-_The_Knowledge_and_the_Ignorance
2.1.1.04_-_Reading,_Yogic_Force_and_the_Development_of_Style
2.2.02_-_Consciousness_and_the_Inconscient
2.3.03_-_The_Overmind
3.00.2_-_Introduction
30.14_-_Rabindranath_and_Modernism
3.02_-_The_Motives_of_Devotion
3.1.04_-_Transformation_in_the_Integral_Yoga
3.4.03_-_Materialism
3.7.1.08_-_Karma
4.04_-_In_the_Total_Christ
4.23_-_The_supramental_Instruments_--_Thought-process
4.4.1.01_-_The_Meaning_of_Spiritual_Transformation
6.09_-_THE_THIRD_STAGE_-_THE_UNUS_MUNDUS
7.01_-_The_Soul_(the_Psychic)
BOOK_II._--_PART_I._ANTHROPOGENESIS.
BOOK_II._--_PART_III._ADDENDA._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_II._--_PART_II._THE_ARCHAIC_SYMBOLISM_OF_THE_WORLD-RELIGIONS
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
Book_of_Imaginary_Beings_(text)
BOOK_XV._-_The_progress_of_the_earthly_and_heavenly_cities_traced_by_the_sacred_history
BOOK_XX._-_Of_the_last_judgment,_and_the_declarations_regarding_it_in_the_Old_and_New_Testaments
ENNEAD_06.05_-_The_One_and_Identical_Being_is_Everywhere_Present_In_Its_Entirety.345
Liber_46_-_The_Key_of_the_Mysteries
Liber_71_-_The_Voice_of_the_Silence_-_The_Two_Paths_-_The_Seven_Portals
Meno
r1927_01_14
Tablets_of_Baha_u_llah_text
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Aleph
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
The_Riddle_of_this_World
The_Shadow_Out_Of_Time

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
undeniable

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

undeniable ::: a. --> Not deniable; incapable of denial; palpably true; indisputable; obvious; as, undeniable evidence.
Unobjectionable; unquestionably excellent; as, a person of undeniable connections.



TERMS ANYWHERE

undeniable ::: a. --> Not deniable; incapable of denial; palpably true; indisputable; obvious; as, undeniable evidence.
Unobjectionable; unquestionably excellent; as, a person of undeniable connections.


Granting that there may be some historical background for the Biblical account, it is nevertheless allegorical throughout. Blavatsky compares the measurements given in the Bible with those of the Great Pyramid and the Tabernacle of Moses, all of which were constructed upon the same abstract formula derived from the number of years in the precessional cycle, and also upon integral values of pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter. Moses symbolized these “under the form and measurements of the tabernacle, that he is supposed to have constructed in the wilderness. On these data the later Jewish High Priests constructed the allegory of Solomon’s Temple — a building which never had a real existence, any more than had King Solomon himself, who is simply, and as much a solar myth as is the still later Hiram Abif, of the Masons, as Ragon has well demonstrated. Thus, if the measurements of this allegorical temple, the symbol of the cycle of Initiation, coincide with those of the Great Pyramid, it is due to the fact that the former were derived from the latter through the Tabernacle of Moses” (SD 1:314-5). And she refers to “the undeniable, clear, and mathematical proofs that the esoteric foundations, or the system used in the building of the Great Pyramid, and the architectural measurements in the Temple of Solomon (whether the latter be mythical or real), Noah’s ark, and the ark of the Covenant, are the same” (SD 2:465).

irrefragable ::: a. --> Not refragable; not to be gainsaid or denied; not to be refuted or overthrown; unanswerable; incontestable; undeniable; as, an irrefragable argument; irrefragable evidence.

*It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.28, Letters on Yoga-I, Page: 155


Periods of despondency and inactivity or even degenency and depravity in India have kept pice with disastrous political developments. But a joy in life's pursuits is evident from the earliest Vedic period and is to be traced in the multifariousness of Indian culture and the colorful Indian history itself which has left the Hindus one of the ancient races still virile among nations and capable of assimilation without itself becoming extinct. Happiness may be enjoyed even in the severest penance and asceticism for which India is noted, while a certain concomitant heroism seems undeniable.

POSITIVE—Inherent in a thing, by and of itself; not related to other things, or to human judgment or feeling; absolute; inherent; not admitting of doubt; final; undeniable and incontestable.

  “Referred to as an enigmatical personage by modern writers. Frederic II., King of Prussia, used to say of him that he was a man whom no one had ever been able to make out. Many are his ‘biographies,’ and each is wilder than the other. By some he was regarded as an incarnate god, by others as a clever Alsatian Jew. One thing is certain, Count de St. Germain — whatever his real patronymic may have been — had a right to his name and title, for he had bought a property called San Germano, in the Italian Tyrol, and paid the Pope for the title. He was uncommonly handsome, and his enormous erudition and linguistic capacities are undeniable, for he spoke English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Swedish, Danish, and many Slavonian and Oriental languages, with equal facility with a native. He was extremely wealthy, never received a sou from anyone — in fact never accepted a glass of water or broke bread with anyone — but made most extravagant presents of superb jewellery to all his friends, even to the royal families of Europe. His proficiency in music was marvellous; he played on every instrument, the violin being his favourite. ‘St. Germain rivalled Paganinni himself,’ was said of him by an octogenarian Belgian in 1835, after hearing the ‘Genoese maestro.’ ‘It is St. Germain resurrected who plays the violin in the body of an Italian Skeleton,’ exclaimed a Lithuanian baron who had heard both.

undeniably ::: adv. --> In an undeniable manner.



QUOTES [4 / 4 - 494 / 494]


KEYS (10k)

   1 Whitman
   1 Manly P. Hall
   1 The Mother
   1 Sri Aurobindo

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   12 Anonymous
   9 Yann Martel
   7 Paula Hawkins
   6 Joel Osteen
   5 R A Salvatore
   4 Steven Erikson
   4 Haruki Murakami
   4 Cassandra Clare
   3 Tara Westover
   3 Susan Ee
   3 Sean Patrick
   3 Nicholas Sparks
   3 Madeline Sheehan
   3 Lisa Kleypas
   3 Katie McGarry
   3 Jordan Peterson
   3 Jordan B Peterson
   3 John Irving
   3 Jay Asher
   3 Jaron Lanier

1:Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. ~ Whitman,
2:Increasing knowledge is important, but we must also remember that we already know far more than we are willing or able to apply. The human race is not wandering in darkness without guidance or direction. It is not necessary to be universally enlightened in order to live a constructive code. The conflict is in the individual. He must decide for himself the degree to which he is willing to control and re-educate his own appetites and instincts. The inducements to per­sonality reorientation are real, evident, and undeniable. ~ Manly P. Hall, Horizon Magazine, Winter 1950, p. 16,
3:It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155,
4:Sweet Mother, there's a flower you have named "The Creative Word".

Yes.

What does that mean?

It is the word which creates.

There are all kinds of old traditions, old Hindu traditions, old Chaldean traditions in which the Divine, in the form of the Creator, that is, in His aspect as Creator, pronounces a word which has the power to create. So it is this... And it is the origin of the mantra. The mantra is the spoken word which has a creative power. An invocation is made and there is an answer to the invocation; or one makes a prayer and the prayer is granted. This is the Word, the Word which, in its sound... it is not only the idea, it is in the sound that there's a power of creation. It is the origin, you see, of the mantra.

In Indian mythology the creator God is Brahma, and I think that it was precisely his power which has been symbolised by this flower, "The Creative Word". And when one is in contact with it, the words spoken have a power of evocation or creation or formation or transformation; the words... sound always has a power; it has much more power than men think. It may be a good power and it may be a bad power. It creates vibrations which have an undeniable effect. It is not so much the idea as the sound; the idea too has its own power, but in its own domain - whereas the sound has a power in the material world.

I think I have explained this to you once; I told you, for example, that words spoken casually, usually without any re- flection and without attaching any importance to them, can be used to do something very good. I think I spoke to you about "Bonjour", "Good Day", didn't I? When people meet and say "Bonjour", they do so mechanically and without thinking. But if you put a will into it, an aspiration to indeed wish someone a good day, well, there is a way of saying "Good Day" which is very effective, much more effective than if simply meeting someone you thought: "Ah! I hope he has a good day", without saying anything. If with this hope in your thought you say to him in a certain way, "Good Day", you make it more concrete and more effective.

It's the same thing, by the way, with curses, or when one gets angry and says bad things to people. This can do them as much harm - more harm sometimes - than if you were to give them a slap. With very sensitive people it can put their stomach out of order or give them palpitation, because you put into it an evil force which has a power of destruction.

It is not at all ineffective to speak. Naturally it depends a great deal on each one's inner power. People who have no strength and no consciousness can't do very much - unless they employ material means. But to the extent that you are strong, especially when you have a powerful vital, you must have a great control on what you say, otherwise you can do much harm. Without wanting to, without knowing it; through ignorance.

Anything? No? Nothing?

Another question?... Everything's over? ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 347-349,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove
2:I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove
3:Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove
4:That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove
5:We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove
6:Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove
7:I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove
8:I am inviting you to discover that deeper than any pattern, deeper than personality, deeper than success or failure, deeper than worth or worthlessness, there is a radiance that is undeniable, always present - the truth of who you are. ~ gangaji, @wisdomtrove
9:Now as he watched Katie toying with a ring that wasn't there, he felt his old investigative instincts kick in. There'd been a husband, he thought; her husband was the missing element. Either she was still married or she wasn't, but he had an undeniable hunch that Katie was still afraid of him. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove
10:From this hour, I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines. Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute. Listening to others, and considering well what they say. Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating. Gently but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove
11:I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove
12:T hat wisdom (which all men by their very nature desire to know and consequently seek after with such great affection of mind) is known in no other way than that it is higher than all knowledge and utterly unknowable and unspeakable in all language. It is unintelligible to all understanding, immeasurable by all measure, improportionable by every proportion, incomparable by all comparison, infigurable by all figuration, unformable by all. formation, ... imimaginable by all imagination, ... inapprehensible in all apprehension and unaffirmable in all affirmation, undeniable in all negation, indoubtable in ail doubt, inopinionable in all opinion; and because in all speech it is inexpressible, there can be no limit to the means of expressing it, being incognitable in all cognition… ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove
13:The Battle of Good and Evil Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes that evil is an independent power, neither created by the good God, nor subordinate to it. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle. Dualism is a very attractive world view because it has a short and simple answer to the famous Problem of Evil, one of the fundamental concerns of human thought. ‘Why is there evil in the world? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. One well-known explanation is that this is God’s way of allowing for human free will. Were there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil, and hence there would be no free will. This, however, is a non-intuitive answer that immediately raises a host of new questions. Freedom of will allows humans to choose evil. Many indeed choose evil and, according to the standard monotheist account, this choice must bring divine punishment in its wake. If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished for this by eternal tortures in hell, why did God create her? Theologians have written countless books to answer such questions. Some find the answers convincing. Some don’t. What’s undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the Problem of Evil. For dualists, it’s easy to explain evil. Bad things happen even to good people because the world is not governed single-handedly by a good God. There is an independent evil power loose in the world. The evil power does bad things. Dualism has its own drawbacks. While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order. If the world was created by a single God, it’s clear why it is such an orderly place, where everything obeys the same laws. But if Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war? Two rival states can fight one another because both obey the same laws of physics. A missile launched from Pakistan can hit targets in India because gravity works the same way in both countries. When Good and Evil fight, what common laws do they obey, and who decreed these laws? So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:The best gift a fan could give me is undeniable support. ~ Jessie J,
2:The truth is undeniable. You tell somebody the truth, it's undeniable. ~ DMX,
3:But I think it's undeniable that the Times is a liberal paper. ~ Daniel Okrent,
4:I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. ~ Paula Hawkins,
5:. . . reality just seems to come in certain undeniable chunks. ~ Stephen T Asma,
6:It is a massive, undeniable failure and a heap of broken promises. ~ Reince Priebus,
7:Their pull was undeniable, like fireworks on top of flaming bonfires. ~ Elena Kincaid,
8:You're my undeniable truth—my destiny,” he murmured, reaching for my lips. ~ Nely Cab,
9:Denying the undeniable just makes you sound like a fool as well as a liar. ~ Ally Carter,
10:You know it's right when you feel this undeniable connection and chemistry. ~ Ali Larter,
11:Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture. ~ Criss Jami,
12:Once more a good man is led astray by the undeniable sexiness of evil. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan,
13:There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery ~ Graham Moore,
14:There is one undeniable truth about our body: it only exists in the present moment. ~ John Kuypers,
15:When you wake up, choose to be happy. That is the fourth undeniable quality of a winner. ~ Joel Osteen,
16:The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away. ~ Wendell Berry,
17:The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust. ~ Steven Spielberg,
18:There is an undeniable correlation between asking God for miracles and receiving them. ~ Linda Evans Shepherd,
19:A baby nursing at a mother's breast... is an undeniable affirmation of our rootedness in nature. ~ David Suzuki,
20:There comes a point when things are undeniable and can't be hidden any longer. Even from yourself. ~ Sarah Dessen,
21:Any woman who marries an Italian must accept the undeniable fact that she has also married his mother. ~ Diane Cilento,
22:Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable. ~ David Eagleman,
23:Unbelievable. Well done, God. You kicked my ass again. I nod with respect. His power is undeniable. Danny ~ Elle Casey,
24:Clothes,” the Frenchwoman continued. “They have a power that is undeniable. They can change everything. ~ Sarah MacLean,
25:It is undeniable that we all create scenarios and then become convinced by them, down to our very cells. ~ Deepak Chopra,
26:She had that kind of undeniable femininity that few women achieve, bogged down as we are by other things. ~ Kate Pullinger,
27:All the worse for the undeniable talent which hides the evil so subtly and makes the danger so delightful. ~ Louisa May Alcott,
28:That was undeniable. But what was also undeniable on this pressure-filled afternoon was Nishikori’s poise and grit. ~ Anonymous,
29:soothing away the trepidation consuming her, replacing it with the undeniable certainty that there is more. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky,
30:Trains had a nostalgic magnetism that was undeniable, even for the many Americans who’d never even been on one. ~ David Baldacci,
31:Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact. ~ Joris Karl Huysmans,
32:Undeniable; Jennifer was one of those women whose meaning, if they have one, is only apparent to husband and children, ~ Nancy Mitford,
33:The country had a lengthy history of coups and the undeniable fact was that Pakistan performed better under military rule. The ~ Kyle Mills,
34:Texas is undeniable...We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest. ~ Jack Kerouac,
35:Sometimes in life, you just feel things that make no sense, but they are there, down to the bone, unavoidable, undeniable. ~ Jessica Gadziala,
36: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,
37:it's more this undeniable mood. It's this warm, familiar and exciting feeling where you miss them already when you're with them. ~ Mary H K Choi,
38:She [my mother] had a will power that was undeniable. She went on to be with the Lord, she passed away but she lives through me. ~ Cory Hardrict,
39:If you have enough money to be comfortable it makes life a lot easier and that's undeniable. But I think happiness is more elusive. ~ Bill Bailey,
40:..There were two undeniable truths in the Realms: It was very easy to overestimate a drow and even easier to underestimate a dwarf. ~ R A Salvatore,
41:...When I set my mind on something I am a force to be reckoned with. Today I will be gravity - subtle, but powerful and undeniable. ~ Ellen Hopkins,
42:I have faith that a script is going to hit me like a ton of bricks, and when that happens, it's undeniable that I should choose the role. ~ Tom Hanks,
43:On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. ~ Barack Obama,
44:The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,
45:The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough. ~ Philip E Tetlock,
46:Network marketing has come of age. It's undeniable that it has become a way to entrepreneurship and independence for millions of people ~ Stephen Covey,
47:One undeniable accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was that it kept Jimmy Carter from being the worst U.S. president in history. ~ Thomas Sowell,
48:Been tryin’ to let you go, been tryin' for fuckin' years,” He said roughly. “Haven’t figured out how yet.”
- Deuce to Eva (Undeniable) ~ Madeline Sheehan,
49:The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America. ~ Hillary Clinton,
50:if we have fallen so far as to need an avatar, an undeniable manifestation of a god, to show us our way, then we are pitiful creatures indeed. ~ R A Salvatore,
51:it is an undeniable fact that, in organizing, petitioning, and speaking out to free the slaves, American women learned how to free themselves. ~ Betty Friedan,
52:That's probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around. ~ Nick Harkaway,
53:I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
54:I’ve come to believe that in everyone’s life, there’s one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
55:The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact — of absolute undeniable fact — from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,
56:There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor. ~ Hugh Laurie,
57:there’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor. ~ Hugh Laurie,
58:I definitely invented the everything bagel. There's no doubt. It's undeniable truth. It's one of those things that's 100% true, 50% of the time. ~ Joe Bastianich,
59:If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516 ~ F lix J Palma,
60:In this moment I’ve discovered a truth that I never thought I would believe. Fate is a real, undeniable force and not all fairytales are fictional. ~ Jewel E Ann,
61:That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out. ~ Bertrand Russell,
62:I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal. ~ Jennifer Elisabeth,
63:Although the detail of our sexual energies and their objects and objectives vastly vary, the existence of our sexuality itself is an undeniable truth. ~ Lynn Margulis,
64:It was undeniable, bright and massive. It was a rainbow, a unicorn, a million-dollar lottery ticket and happiness incarnate all rolled into one thing. ~ Mariana Zapata,
65:Oh no,” she murmured, her smile thawing, falling, carried away with the undeniable, inevitable, impossible truth of it. She was falling in love with him. ~ Marissa Meyer,
66:He wasn’t just my father, but my friend. We did things together, talked about things, and formed a bong that was undeniable but indescribable at the same time. ~ E L Todd,
67:Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. ~ Joseph Conrad,
68:It may be that there is such a thing as racial memory, and it is supported by the undeniable observation that the goblins will get you if you don't watch out. ~ Jeff Cooper,
69:Do you truly believe that you can defeat the plague? I believe that I must try or we are all lost, anyway. A sombre thought, but the logic is undeniable. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky,
70:Love is not materialistic. It's intangible yet somehow an undeniable feeling. You know it when you have it. I have lots of love in my life and I am blessed. ~ Melanie Iglesias,
71:The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists? ~ Anthony Burgess,
72:The sick constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself. ~ Alfred Hayes,
73:was a glaring, undeniable example of one of the most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. ~ Jocko Willink,
74:While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart. ~ Charles P Pierce,
75:Back of a bike is comin' for ya and soon too, cuz baby the way you’re lookin’ at me is tellin’ me you want it. And you want it bad."
- Deuce to Eva (Undeniable) ~ Madeline Sheehan,
76:Soon, she began to sense that the night sky she saw above her was somehow different from the sky she was used to see. The strangeness of it was subtle but undeniable. ~ Haruki Murakami,
77:Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief. ~ Samuel Beckett,
78:This points us to an undeniable theological truth we learn from Genesis 4: humans are murderers, not because we commit murder, but because we are murderers at heart. ~ Charles R Swindoll,
79:The ultimate Consciousness is always present everywhere. It is beyond space and time, with not before or after. It is undeniable and obvious. So what can be said about it? ~ Abhinavagupta,
80:it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. ~ Paula Hawkins,
81:I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger. ~ Douglas Coupland,
82:That's good; don't deny it. Denying the undeniable just makes you sound like a fool as well as a liar. In this profession, you can be one- sometimes the other. But never both. ~ Ally Carter,
83:On a surface level, all one finds is repeated forms of shallow whispers. Having the courage to explore deeply, a wealth of buried infinite lifetimes emerge - an undeniable force. ~ T F Hodge,
84:I contemplated this undeniable path we had both stepped onto and rushed along without much planning, without enough caution or judgment.  And there it was.  Such things happened. ~ S J Wright,
85:Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
86:That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth ~ Edmund Burke,
87:The acutely Christian character of the British abolitionist movement is undeniable, for its leaders were all consciously acting out of the principles of their deeply held faith. ~ Eric Metaxas,
88:In case you didn't know, dead people don't bleed. If you can bleed-see it, feel it-then you know you're alive. It's irrefutable, undeniable proof. Sometimes I just need a little reminder. ~ Amy Efaw,
89:It is a weary lament to lay most acts of violence and aggression, from the strictly local to the truly global, squarely at the feet of men. Yet the association is strong and undeniable ~ Bryan Sykes,
90:A ghost of that siren smile graced her lips as she tilted her head closer to mine, creating the undeniable pull of the sailor lost to the sea to the beautiful goddess calling him home. ~ Katie McGarry,
91:Given her choice of any three words to hear from Logan's lips, Maddie probably would have chosen I love you. But she had to admit, Lift your skirts had an undeniable appeal. ~ Tessa Dare,
92:his face had the terrifying look of an undeniable murderer, or rather, to be fair, the look of a reckless man in a terrible hurry to get ahead—which amounts to the same thing. ~ Louis Ferdinand C line,
93:The minute I knew I was in love was the minute when there was no question about it. One night I was lying in the dark, looking at her looking at me, and it just was there, undeniable. ~ David Levithan,
94:Those who deny human-caused climate change offer no compelling evidence to better explain the undeniable rise in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global temperature. ~ Alan Lowenthal,
95:We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know. ~ George Bernard Shaw,
96:That's the van? It looks like a rotting banana." This was undeniable - Eric had painted the van a neon shade of yellow, and it was blotched with dings and rust like splotches of decay. ~ Cassandra Clare,
97:The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences. ~ Ferdinand de Saussure,
98:Now then, it did exist, this was an undeniable fact; and since the human mind dotes on objects of wonder, you can understand the worldwide excitement caused by this unearthly apparition. As ~ Jules Verne,
99:Original sin is the only rational solution of the undeniable fact of the deep, universal and early manifested sinfulness of men in all ages, of every class, and in every part of the world ~ Charles Hodge,
100:Like his sister and like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality, and the undeniable fact that there are different kinds of Emersons annoyed him beyond measure. ~ E M Forster,
101:Republicans woke up Sunday with an undeniable reality. Donald Trump's the clear front-runner now for their party's nomination. Trump, celebrated, of course, his big win in South Carolina. ~ Chris Matthews,
102:the undeniable feeling that, as you castigate a troll, he’s rubbing his Red Dwarf mouse pad against his crotch and sighing, “Angry liberal women typing at me. Oh yah. That’s how I like it. ~ Caitlin Moran,
103:You find in life that there are different levels of being in love with someone, and maybe everyone doesn't find that undeniable, indescribable... I can't describe it, it's indescribable. ~ Kristen Stewart,
104:desire. Heat and music and the ebb and flow of revelers create an undeniable pulse of excitement. It exists in the balmy ocean air, settles on my skin, and sizzles against my nerve endings. ~ Meredith Wild,
105:Don't you just want to make something that lives forever? Something that's phenomenal, something that's great, something that's undeniable? That touches the core of every person that hears it? ~ Jared Leto,
106:I still just like everybody else need to meet quotas with my spins, with my buzz and make my way into the office. It has to be undeniable; the world has to know about you before Jay-Z makes a call. ~ Drake,
107:Once a vegan, we are always so, because our motivation is not personal and self-oriented, but is based on concern for others and on our undeniable interconnectedness with other living beings. ~ Will Tuttle,
108:That's the van? It looks like a rotting banana."
This was undeniable - Eric had painted the van a neon shade of yellow, and it was blotched with dings and rust like splotches of decay. ~ Cassandra Clare,
109:Every last one of them, men and women alike, carries the same expression: an undeniable willingness to work, and a confusion as to why they have to fight for the right to support their families. ~ Anna Clark,
110:Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
111:You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond. ~ Jordan Peterson,
112:You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
113:Baseball can have its perfect dimensions, its undeniable drama, but hockey, for all its wrongs, still has the potential to deliver a momentary, flashing magic that is found in no other game we play. ~ Roy MacGregor,
114:I am an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, Sir—" Venizelos felt an undeniable rush of adrenaline and pleasure as he faced the burly captain squarely "—and the Royal Manticoran Navy does not 'bluff. ~ David Weber,
115:it is undeniable, that the rule of a majority may be almost as hostile to freedom as the rule of a minority: the divine right of majorities is a dogma as little possessed of absolute truth as any other. ~ Anonymous,
116:The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow this seeding independence to root in my childhood Eden’s soil and grow until at last it was undeniable. ~ Aspen Matis,
117:In Islam, it is the "moderate" who is left to split hairs,
because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-
jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world. ~ Sam Harris,
118:Anything we must assume in order to function in the world is part of general revelation. The undeniable facts of experience reflect the created structure of physical nature or human nature, or both. ~ Nancy R Pearcey,
119:I missed the crowds in those big stadiums, the flashbulbs, the roaring cheers - the majesty of the whole thing. I missed it bitterly. So did my father. We shared a thirst to return; unspoken, undeniable. ~ Mitch Albom,
120:It's a pity we're still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene - human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth - is already an undeniable reality. ~ Paul J Crutzen,
121:Just as welfare was said to "cause poverty," the experts may soon announce that Medicare causes baldness and that Social Security is a risk factor for osteoporosis: the correlations are undeniable. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich,
122:Mathematics or Fate: Whatever that force is that keeps bringing us together in world after world, it’s powerful. Undeniable. But I still don’t know whether that force means my salvation or my destruction ~ Claudia Gray,
123:Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus—yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle. ~ Cornel West,
124:There was an undeniable charm about the man, not merely the youthful airs of one who hadn’t seen the worst the world has to offer, but the blaze of someone who managed to believe in change, in spite of it. ~ V E Schwab,
125:I had acquired an undeniable mystique - if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don't forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys - even if the older woman has a penis! ~ John Irving,
126:Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view. ~ William Faulkner,
127:You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable. ~ James Salter,
128:He had found in himself the perfect, undeniable case of insanity. He possessed wisdom, patience, tolerance, truthfulness, loyalty, and moral fortitude—all the qualities that go to make an utter madman. ~ Machado de Assis,
129:If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here. ~ June Jordan,
130:The wolf sniffed beneath the door to be sure this was a human cottage. The scent was undeniable. No pigs, except in bacon form. The wolf thought bacon form was a very sensible way for pigs to behave. ~ Vivian Vande Velde,
131:It's undeniable there's been remarkable progress for African-Americans in this country. They've been elected senators and governors and running major corporations. But obviously we still have a long way to go. ~ Dana Bash,
132:It is undeniable that every human being is entitled to living space, daily bread, and the protection of the law as a common birthright; these are fundamentals and should not be handed out as an act of charity. ~ Alfred Delp,
133:It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy. ~ Elizabeth Kostova,
134:They use a variety of mechanisms to develop this trust, including training, hunting, high-risk sports, competition, visualization, etc. Regardless of the particular mechanism(s) used, the results are undeniable. ~ Massad Ayoob,
135:They use a variety of mechanisms to develop this trust, including training, hunting, high-risk sports, competition, visualization, etc. Regardless of the particular mechanism( s) used, the results are undeniable. ~ Massad Ayoob,
136:It's because of this massive immigration and more in some places, (that) France's image has undeniably changed. There are a number of neighborhoods where you are no longer living a French life. That's undeniable. ~ Marine Le Pen,
137:I think the way that I delivered my request for acting was undeniable, and I think that I was blessed enough to have parents who saw it as something that there was no argument about. For that, I will always be grateful. ~ Nina Arianda,
138:It is undeniable that the French were in a better situation in 1960s then than they are today in 2017. I don't look in the rearview mirror. But there was no need for us to experience an end to social progress since then. ~ Marine Le Pen,
139:The fantasy of the wedding day is that it represents undeniable public and private truth that you have been chosen. For that one day, you are the most valuable creature in the world - a treasure, a princess, a prize. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
140:We continue to see undeniable evidence that abuse and torture has been widespread and systematic, yet high-level government officials have not been held accountable for creating the policies that led to these atrocities. ~ Anthony Romero,
141:asked many people these questions and their answers are invariable. “Of course it would.” The cultural correlation is undeniable: we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the higher the IQ, the more likely one is to succeed ~ Sean Patrick,
142:The resemblance of ... the alien abduction of 'experiencers' to the contracts described by our own volunteers is undeniable. How can anyone doubt, after reading our accounts... that DMT elicits 'typical' alien encounters? ~ Rick Strassman,
143:All those small glimmers...connecting, collecting...have turned into an undeniable possibility...casting a light that cuts through the darkness of despair—! So I...made up my mind. I'll never stop reaching for that light!!! ~ Jun Mochizuki,
144:As the sociologist Ann Swidler has observed, “common sense”is really just deeply embedded culture: “the set of assumptions so unselfconscious as to seem a natural, transparent undeniable part of the structure of the world. ~ Thomas E Ricks,
145:Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. ~ James Madison,
146:I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it. ~ John Stuart Mill,
147:I do one take; I never overdubbed twice. I know there's stuff that isn't perfect, but it doesn't matter: Nothing is perfect, and there is a magic there that is undeniable because of the fact that we don't care about those things. ~ Neil Young,
148:I am inviting you to discover that deeper than any pattern, deeper than personality, deeper than success or failure, deeper than worth or worthlessness, there is a radiance that is undeniable, always present - the truth of who you are. ~ Gangaji,
149:How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real. ~ Jack Vance,
150:I looked down, unable to meet the intensity in Nat’s eyes. Tonight, my crush for Nat had moved beyond a crush. The chemistry between us was undeniable, and the more we clashed, the more we wanted each other." - Summer, Perfect Summer ~ Kailin Gow,
151:As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable. ~ Al Sharpton,
152:It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right. ~ George F Kennan,
153:...when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. ~ Julie Orringer,
154:I believed that my parents and grandparents stayed married for fifty years because of the simple yet undeniable fact that they worked like hell at it every single day, not because they bought each other a commemorative teacup every year. ~ Wade Rouse,
155:In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened. ~ Aspen Matis,
156:The 'magic' is the known and unknown quiet, spiritual, invisible thread which links and reveals harmonic elements to a universe of high vibrational sensory. And our beloved Bro. Maurice David knew it's undeniable creative power, from within. ~ T F Hodge,
157:Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research. ~ Steven Johnson,
158:Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated. ~ John Bright,
159:Gay and costly apparel directly tends to create and influence lust.... The fact is plain and undeniable, it has the effect both on the wearer and beholder. You kindle a flame, which, at the same time consumes both yourself and your admirers. ~ John Wesley,
160:People have always said how if you put Maddox and I into the same room together, the universe feels as though it stops. We had that undeniable pull toward each other. When we were together, it was our world, everyone else merely existed in it. ~ Amo Jones,
161:Belief is unprovable, but it is a stepping-stone to truth. Faith is unshakable. It is neither belief nor truth but lights the way between them. Truth is undeniable. It is both the intention and the end of belief, and the reward of faith.   My ~ Ken Dickson,
162:Belief is unprovable, but it is a stepping-stone to truth.
Faith is unshakable. It is neither belief nor truth but lights the way between them.
Truth is undeniable. It is both the intention and the end of belief, and the reward of faith. ~ Ken Dickson,
163:and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime. ~ Michael Chabon,
164:I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I've heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it. ~ Dorothea Lange,
165:do, something undeniable. I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it – there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that, or look around for something to distract you. ~ Anonymous,
166:Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers. ~ Alexander Hamilton,
167:At night when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. ~ Paula Hawkins,
168:There’s an undeniable thrill about meeting a stranger and spending a few hours together, indulging in each other’s lives. It’s that spurt of saying whatever you want and leaving it behind with someone who’ll never look at you and think of it again. ~ Danielle Esplin,
169:An undeniable truth is that while Obama and Pelosi and George Soros and whoever else tell you and me to get off oil, they won't - they're the elites. They're smarter, they're running the world, and they have to be able to get to where they have to go. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
170:"It is an undeniable psychological fact that the more one concentrates on one's unconscious contents the more they become charged with energy; they become vitalized, as if illuminated from within. In fact, they turn into something like a substitute reality." ~ Carl Jung,
171:I'd have to ask Oberon to leave him a present on his front doorstep. He'd do it camouflaged too, so that even if Mr. Semerdjian was watching - and he probably would be - it would appear to be undeniable, physical evidence that, sometimes, shit just happens. ~ Kevin Hearne,
172:Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth. ~ Michael J Fox,
173:The debate [in Undeniable] was nominally about creationism as a "viable" explanation for what we observe around us. For my side, the debate went very well; I'm not sure what I would change, although I can imagine shortening my answers during the rebuttals, perhaps. ~ Bill Nye,
174:Sometimes, the sign is the whisper in our heart, the deep and undeniable pull, the inherent knowing that the answer is already there.... If we are open to this, it will truly enrich our lives. Because life is so much more than we can see in this dimension. ~ Laura Lynne Jackson,
175:A revelation is to be received as coming from God, not because of its internal excellence, or because we judge it to be worthy of God; but because God has declared it to be His in as plain and undeniable a manner as He has declared creation and providence to be His. ~ William Law,
176:It is not proven that Elizabeth's person equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time. ~ Shirley Jackson,
177:I have travelled, and looked at the world, and loved it.
Now I don't want to look at the world anymore,
there seems nothing there.
In not-looking, and in not-seeing
comes a new strength
and undeniable new gods share their life with us, when we cease to see. ~ D H Lawrence,
178:Even though someone appears to shrug off a sideways comment or to not be affected by a rumor, it’s impossible to know everything else going on in that person’s life, and how we might be adding to his/her pain. People do have an impact on the lives of others; that’s undeniable. ~ Jay Asher,
179:It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy. ~ Elizabeth Kostova,
180:At night I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I had and threw away. I can't get comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends. ~ Paula Hawkins,
181:I never went to drama school, I don't have any certificates saying: 'He's a qualified actor.' But I did think that House was something I didn't have to apologise for. It was something I was really proud of and it was sort of ... whether you liked it or not, it was undeniable. ~ Hugh Laurie,
182:Who knew? I had no idea that someone could be such a thorn in your foot during a death march and still be irresistibly attractive in some magical, undeniable way."
"So is this what people call sweet nothings? Because somehow, I expected it to be a little more...complementary. ~ Susan Ee,
183:I don't care if it's five dead cops, a dead black citizen in Minnesota or in Louisiana, there are people trying to profit from it, politically profit from it. It's undeniable. I think it's cheap and I think it's sick. But they are there. And you and I both know who they are. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
184:These days, when I knock on the doors of the Tryptamine Palace, I am no longer greeted with unconditional love, but instead, I am reminded of the responsibility that comes with ultimate knowledge: an undeniable responsibility to myself, to my tribe, to my species, to my planet. ~ James Oroc,
185:It is a great truth, wonderful as it is undeniable, that all our happiness - temporal, spiritual, and eternal - consists in one thing; namely, in resigning ourselves to God, and in leaving ourselves with Him, to do with us and in us just as He pleases. ~ Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon,
186:Pierre's madness consisted in not waiting, as he had formerly done, to discover personal attributes which he called "good qualities" in people before loving them: his heart overflowed with love, and by loving without cause he never failed to discover undeniable reasons for loving. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
187:No, it's not, but when I read a book without sex, I feel like I'm missing that connection between the characters...call me a pervert, but I think sex in a book is not just about getting all hot and steamy. It's about seeing the characters form this bond that is undeniable, you know? ~ Meghan Quinn,
188:I am an alien. I start a lot of relationships with artists because of what I'm capable of doing with the machine and with beats. Anyone can just listen to a beat, that's boring. But when you actually perform in front of them, it's like: wow. It's undeniable talent. That's my advantage. ~ AraabMuzik,
189:The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already. ~ Daniel Henninger,
190:A strange stillness had settled over him, as well, a waiting. The earth was shifting beneath him, and he had the hideous suspicion that his entire life was about to change if he didn't get out of there, now. Away from the unexpected, undeniable lure of the dowdy young woman in front of him. ~ Anne Stuart,
191:There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed. ~ Vasily Grossman,
192:The one undeniable benefit of having spent some time in the closet is that it nurtures a talent that you can fall back on any time: lying convincingly. Sometimes I worried that queer kids in the twenty-first century coming out at twelve, or even younger, would never develop that valuable skill. ~ Bob Smith,
193:There came a time in everyone’s life when they realized that in spite of how hard they’d been running from themselves, everywhere they went, there they were: Addictions and compulsions were nothing but marching bands of distraction, masking truths that were unpleasant, but ultimately undeniable. ~ J R Ward,
194:Whether you're playing a mom on-screen or you're in a car pool lane driving your child to school in the morning, there are similarities that are undeniable. And once you're a mother, there are certain things that are instinct. You just have a better understanding of what it means to be a mother. ~ Nia Long,
195:the urge to run is becoming overwhelming. At night when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. ~ Paula Hawkins,
196:The temptation is to claim that one’s political commitments are somehow uniquely, objectively grounded in reality, therefore undeniable, not a matter of moral choice at all but of mere rationality. This stratagem lends a certain repressive, totalitarian air to even ‘‘moderate’’ political discourse ~ Anonymous,
197:Now as he watched Katie toying with a ring that wasn't there, he felt his old investigative instincts kick in. There'd been a husband, he thought; her husband was the missing element. Either she was still married or she wasn't, but he had an undeniable hunch that Katie was still afraid of him. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
198:The immense and undeniable loss of freedoms, as they were in 1900, is undeniable. We have seen the acceleration in efficiency of the tyrannizing factors. It’s enough to keep a man worried. Wars are made to make debt. I suppose there’s a possible out in space satellites and other ways of making debt. ~ Ezra Pound,
199:And the Truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world -whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself -is amenable to man's thought, and that he had dominion over it when he knows it. ~ Emmet Fox,
200:It really occurred to me at a certain point: women have not been embodied. Feminism has not been embodied. It hasn't gotten into us in a way where it is so undeniable that there is nothing to prove. Do you know what I mean? That we are so in our feminist skin, so to speak, that we are that world now. ~ Eve Ensler,
201:There are so many minutes and hours and days we spend taking life for granted, not feeling it so much as going along with it. But then there are moments like this, when the aliveness of life is crystalline, palpable, undeniable. It is the ultimate buoy against drowning. It is the ever-saving grace. ~ David Levithan,
202:Why don't you want a boyfriend?"

"I don't know. Maybe I do. I'd just have to meet the right guy. Someone who isn't ordinary. Someone who get someone I fit perfectly with. I want heat, chemistry, an undeniable connection. You know what I mean? I want it all. I'm done with ordinary and mediocre. ~ Jessica Park,
203:He stood there for a long moment, the note in his hand, and just looked at her. At the undeniable heartbreak in her, and the dignity and the vulnerability.
Then he pressed the note into Neksa's hand and said, "Lesson learned. You shouldn't trust either of us."
He was gone before she spoke again. ~ Rachel Caine,
204:Nothing is like experiencing the affirming, undeniable nod of God. So I’m praying that He will do something obvious to show you that you’re on the right track—so that when seasons come with fewer evidences, you’ll have the unwavering assurance that God is believable. Go into this new year believing God! ~ Beth Moore,
205:It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans - those who have sealed the Deal, who aren't beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement . ~ John Ridley,
206:The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact— from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns ~ Anonymous,
207:We would like to see science and higher education developing here [on the Russian Far East], so that it could become one of the major research centres in the entire APR system. Undoubtedly a lot remains to be done here, but given the labour market demand, the relevance of such a university is undeniable. ~ Vladimir Putin,
208:Charity had discovered that life was filled with important moments. They were brightly colored confetti strewn on a landscape of gray. Each one, its own miracle. Sometimes, those moments passed quietly. But a few—a glorious few—were recognized immediately for their inexplicable but undeniable significance. ~ Heather Burch,
209:I think Bruno Mars is a great example of a great voice and classic songwriting with a twist that makes it contemporary. I think he's done a great job of it. I think Katy Perry has undeniable songs for what she does, for that pop market. And, if we're talking in the truly pop market, I would say those two. ~ Kara DioGuardi,
210:Poverty feeds into the clean-water crisis, which contributes to hunger, and so on. There's undeniable interconnectivity among these issues. Just one of these problems can be deadly on its own, but in the most disadvantaged areas there is a perfect storm of problems. And it takes its greatest toll on children. ~ Matt Damon,
211:And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol.
It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle ~ Dorothy L Sayers,
212:From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines. Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute. Listening to others, and considering well what they say. Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating. Gently but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. ~ Walt Whitman,
213:Thane gazed down at her, his entire world tipped on its axis. He'd never seen anything more miraculous than what he'd just witnessed. He'd never seen anything so beautiful.
Can I keep you? The words raced through his mind, a thought - and a nearly undeniable compulsion.
Keep you. ~ Heather Killough Walden,
214:When I turn in my list, obviously every record was important to me. I didn't just put records on there to put records on there. I was excited that "All I Do Is Win" could go on there because you hear it at the end of the game and that represents victory. That's undeniable. You can't hate on that, it's impossible. ~ DJ Khaled,
215:Ever since I was a kid I knew I wanted to be this. To do this. It’s in my genes.’ He walked over to her and pressed a finger to her chest. ‘Just as it’s in your genes, Evie. You’re a pureblood. It’s even more in your genes than mine. For you, being a Hunter is as undeniable as having blue eyes and a tight ass. ~ Sarah Alderson,
216:Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death? ~ John Irving,
217:Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death? ~ John Irving,
218:For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind. ~ Antonin Artaud,
219:He loved them with a complete and undeniable love, the love of a father. The best he could do was try to turn their killer instincts on those other monsters out there in the night who deserved it, and in a twisted and sickening way maybe they would be making the world safer from the same darkness they each carried. The ~ Candice Fox,
220:we find that the optimists have an undeniable advantage over the pessimists. Many studies show that they do better on exams, in their chosen profession, and in their relationships, live longer and in better health, enjoy a better chance of surviving postoperative shock, and are less prone to depression and suicide. ~ Matthieu Ricard,
221:While short-term job loss is the inevitable and often painful result of demonetization and dematerialization, the long-term payoff is undeniable: goods and services once reserved for the wealthy few are now available to anyone equipped with a smart phone—which, these days, thankfully, includes the rising billion. ~ Peter H Diamandis,
222:It's important to be aware of how we treat others. Even though someone appears to shrug off a sideways comment or to not be affected by a rumor, it's impossible to know everything else going on in that person's life, how we might be adding to his/her pain. People do have an impact on the lives of others; that's undeniable. ~ Jay Asher,
223:we can empathize with someone else, but we cannot truly see the world as another person sees it, or judge events as they affect the mind and the heart of another, even a friend. But we must try. For the sake of all the world, we must try. This is the test of altruism, the most basic and undeniable ingredient for society. ~ R A Salvatore,
224:For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar—which he obviously was not. ~ Hannah Arendt,
225:It is undeniable that others and the larger world, so beleaguered at this moment in history, need everything that we have to give. But what to give is the problem. It seems finally clear that we cannot find out what to do simply by thinking about it. We need to gain our inspiration and our direction from much deeper sources. ~ Reginald Ray,
226:One had come to accept that history and crisis were essentially synonymous for Jews - Genesis to Gdansk - but what was happening now, what they were experiencing since the National Socialists had taken Germany and Europe after it, was wholly different and horrifying and inexplicable and completely undeniable. ~ Kim Brooks,
227:Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly-carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel. ~ George Eliot,
228:Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant’s club on your neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel. ~ George Eliot,
229:But fairness is where we’re heading, at least in regard to marriage, which has emerged as the terrain on which Americans are hashing out their feelings about gays and lesbians. The trajectory is undeniable. The trend line is clear. And the choice before the justices is whether to be handmaidens to history, or whether to sit it out. ~ Frank Bruni,
230:Governments took advantage of the tendency for local pride and convinced their people that their country was the best at everything and governments were the reason. Governments never let the facts get in the way of a good story, but the internet has a way of inserting undeniable facts into the conversation that temper national pride. ~ Adam Kokesh,
231:---
Desire - hot, wet and undeniable - unfolded in her belly even as her temper flared. "You don't own me."
"I know that," he said, reaching out and tugging her close so that their bodies melded together, his hand splayed across her lower back, searing her skin. "But what you need to realize is that you own me - body and soul. ~ Avery Flynn,
232:I stepped onto the spiritual path moved by an inner sense that I might find greatness of heart, that I might find profound belonging, that I might find a hidden source of love and compassion. Like a homing instinct for freedom, my intuitive sense that this was possible was the faint, flickering, yet undeniable expression of faith. ~ Sharon Salzberg,
233:When the link between the use of unsafe, mercury-laden vaccine and autism, ADHD, asthma, allergies and diabetes becomes undeniable, mainstream medicine will be sporting a huge, self-inflicted and well-deserved black eye. Then will come the billion-dollar awards, by enraged juries, to the children and their families. I can't wait. ~ Bernard Rimland,
234:Charity had discovered that life was filled with important moments. They were brightly colored confetti strewn on a landscape of gray. Each one, its own miracle. Sometimes, those moments passed quietly. But a few—a glorious few—were recognized immediately for their inexplicable but undeniable significance. They were bombs of promise. ~ Heather Burch,
235:We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset,
236:One of the advantages of being an older woman in films,is that you don't care as much about so many things. There are women in history throughout the world that need to be portrayed. Women don't stop being interesting at 20, they get more interesting and more fascinating and people are going to have to write about them. We're undeniable. ~ Allison Janney,
237:Spools of raw gratitude unraveled in Sonja. She was an idiot to be so impressed by legs that walked, wrists that bent, hands that held. Instead of explaining, she focused on the sensation of good fortune, of undeniable blessing, so she could later return to this memory to marvel at the girl’s body, how remarkable it is, this human matter. ~ Anthony Marra,
238:I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.

[John Stuart Mill, in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington, May 31, 1866.] ~ John Stuart Mill,
239:I believe in democracy—in its indisputable achievements and its unfulfilled promise. I believe in American political institutions—in the genius inherent in their design and in the undeniable good they have done when put to their best use. I believe in the power of the human heart—in its capacity for truth and justice, love and forgiveness. ~ Parker J Palmer,
240:Her hair was the blackest I ever saw. Her eyes matched her hair. Her nose was not quite large enough, I admit. Her mouth and chin were (to quote Mr. Franklin) morsels for the gods; and her complexion (on the same undeniable authority) was as warm as the sun itself, with this great advantage over the sun, that it was always in nice order to look at. ~ Lewis Carroll,
241:It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior. ~ Jane Goodall,
242:In all Gabriel’s life he could not remember his brother giving even the prettiest of Shadowhunter girls a second glance. Yet he looked at this scarred mundane servant as if she were the sun rising. It was inexplicable, but it was also undeniable. He could see the horror on his brother’s face as Sophie’s good opinion of him shattered before his eyes. ~ Cassandra Clare,
243:Who knew?” he says. “I had no idea that someone could be such a thorn in your foot during a death march and still be irresistibly attractive in some magical, undeniable way.” “So is that what people call sweet nothings? Because somehow, I expected it to be a little more . . . complimentary.” “Don’t you know a heartfelt declaration of love when you hear one? ~ Susan Ee,
244:In all Gabriel’s life he could not remember his brother giving even the prettiest of Shadowhunter girls a second glance. Yet he looked at this scarred mundane servant as if she were the sun rising. It was inexplicable, but it was also undeniable. He could see the
horror on his brother’s face as Sophie’s good opinion of him shattered before his eyes. ~ Cassandra Clare,
245:The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope. It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was. ~ Michael Connelly,
246:HARTMANN observed something very much like insight which his theo- retical background led him to interpret otherwise: The difference between these records [for monkeys] and those of the chicks, cats and dogs . . . is undeniable. Whereas the latter were practically unanimous . . . in showing a process of gradual learning by a gradual elimination of unsuccessful ~ Anonymous,
247:Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks?
It doesn't matter.
We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world. ~ Anne Rice,
248:Our bodies moved in sync, our breaths shaky. It was an undeniable connection and I never ever wanted it to end. We remained that way as he took me to a place where only bliss existed, and we were perfectly right.
We were locked bodies and scarred souls completely exposed. And it was okay because I wanted him to have a piece of mine.
And I gave it to him. ~ Kate Stewart,
249:The counseling did nothing at first—I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful”—but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself. ~ Tara Westover,
250:When Morgan looked at the pedigrees of families like the Kallikaks, he did not see undeniable proof of the heredity of feeblemindedness. He saw instead many generations of poor people suffering enduring hardships. “It is obvious that these groups of individuals have lived under demoralizing social conditions that might swamp a family of average persons,” Morgan wrote. ~ Carl Zimmer,
251:Genghis Khan recognized that warfare was not a sporting contest or a mere match between rivals; it was a total commitment of one people against another. Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy. Triumph could not be partial. It was complete, total, and undeniable—or it was nothing. ~ Jack Weatherford,
252:My deception was believed because it was built on a foundation of truth … Hitler's first layer is an undeniable truth, such as: The German workers are poor. The second layer is divided equally between flattery and truth: The German worker deserves to be prosperous. The third layer is fabrication: The Jews and the Communists and Jews have stolen what is rightfully yours. ~ Bette Greene,
253:You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond. ~ Jordan Peterson,
254:The pure menace radiating from my younger sister is undeniable. She can hate me, but I need her to know that she has something that Stella never did: a place to fall. "And if he hurts you or if anyone hurts you...you have me."
It feels unnatural, but I hug my sister. Her arms are limp at her sides, but she doesn't push me away.
"Remember, you have me," I repeat. ~ Katie McGarry,
255:As advanced as mankind likes to think it is, we all have that age-old, primal, undeniable dread of darkness. Of being unable to see danger coming. We don’t like to think that we’re afraid of the dark anymore, but if that’s true, then why do we work so hard to make sure our cities are constantly lit? We cloak ourselves in so much light that we can barely see the stars at night. ~ Anonymous,
256:You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
257:He offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole, naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map specially conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It’s obvious, undeniable; I can’t imagine why somebody hasn’t already seen— ~ Umberto Eco,
258:There is an undeniable correlation between functional illiteracy, poverty, and crime—in fact, eleven states predict their future need for prison cells based on the reading levels of their fourth graders. Books can change lives, yes, and so can the lack of them. ~ Roxanne J. Coady in Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen (eds.) The Book That Changed My Life (2006), ISBN 1-592-40210-0, p. xvi.,
259:Joshen tipped her chin up and kissed her. He was always soft and gentle, but today Senna felt an undeniable hunger somewhere deep inside him. He was trying to suppress it. But she didn’t want that. She wanted him to banish the lingering foulness of the curse and the fear that had never released her from its sweaty grasp, replacing all of that with the sweet taste of his mouth. ~ Amber Argyle,
260:Both creatively and organizationally, being medicated has helped me immensely. My career did not start until I was medicated. And then I can track - the years I was off medication, things dipped. And the years I went back on medication is when things started to get good for me again career wise. It is 100 percent in my case undeniable that being medicated helped my creativity. ~ Chris Gethard,
261:Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. ~ George Saunders,
262:As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps eighty per cent. of her armies were neither slave-holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union. ~ John Brown Gordon,
263:[I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset,
264:Within five years, the effects of the civil rights revolution were undeniable. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in the South soared. In Alabama the rate leaped from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent; in Louisiana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent.33 ~ Michelle Alexander,
265:The second thing I wrote down that day was that exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,
266:You cannot kill or steal from a man while he is asleep and heartbroken. While it is said that everything is fair in love an war, the dictum is nullified when both love and war occur simultaneously; then, the rules of battle become more stringent. The politics that lead to war can always be argued, but there is an undeniable sympathy that must be extended when a woman leaves a man. ~ Salvador Plascencia,
267:I love all sorts of animation, probably the most beautiful would be the tradtional hand drawn animation that Disney is known for. Stop-motion has a certain "grittieness" and is filled with imperfections, and yet their is an undeniable truth, that what you see really exits, even it if is posed by hand, 24 times a second. This truth is what I find most attractive about stop-motion animation. ~ Henry Selick,
268:There is no one ugly, deep, dark, powerful or evil enough to stop God from loving you. Nothing anyone can ever do to you can sever your connection to God. Nothing you could ever do can dam the unstoppable love of God for you. His love for you is undeniable, unrelenting and unconditional. You may ignore God, ridicule Him and reject Him but His love for you will remain constant and unchanging. ~ T B Joshua,
269:Above all, Alzheimer wanted the medical world to recognize that mental illnesses have an undeniable material component. There was an obvious political reason for taking such a position because it could then be established that dementia-like conditions are not part of the spiritual/theological domain, but undeniably biological in origin and therefore not attributable with moral implications. ~ Margaret M Lock,
270:Because despite the undeniable knowledge that I wasn't human—or mostly human, anyway—despite the proof the computer screen had show in the repair room, I still picture my interior just the same as any other sixteen-year-old girl's. Blood and guts and bones. A brain, and a functioning heart. Hopes and dreams, fears and sorrow. They could tell me the truth, but they couldn't force me to accept it. ~ Debra Driza,
271:After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred and undeniable," and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident." This was mroe than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. ~ Jill Lepore,
272:For me, love is the feeling of being at home no matter where on earth you are. It's a comfort that silences anxieties. It's the feeling of finding a safe place in the middle of disaster. Love does not judge. Love promotes personal growth. Love is not materialistic. It's intangible yet somehow an undeniable feeling. You know it when you have it. I have lots of love in my life and I am blessed. ~ Melanie Iglesias,
273:Men can sense when a wall is coming down, and they can't help the fact that they have to be there to watch it fall, or better yet, help push it over.

It has been argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall had nothing whatsoever to do with the collapse of communism: it was just a weekend project that got out of control—thousands of German guys satisfying their undeniable urge to fix things up. ~ Stuart McLean,
274:Outside the ivory tower, ordinary people are not interested in a worldview that spins out a logically coherent system, and yet contradicts human experience. They are looking for a worldview that makes sense of the world we actually inhabit. They want one that explains the undeniable facts of human experience, not one that suppresses those facts for the sake of its own internal logical consistency. ~ Nancy R Pearcey,
275:It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance. ~ William F Buckley Jr,
276:It’s largely because the Palestinian resistance has never prevented differences from existing within it—even at the cost of open confrontations—that it has been able to give the Israeli army a hard time. Here as elsewhere, political fragmentation is just as much the sign of an undeniable ethical vitality as it is the nightmare of the intelligence agencies charged with mapping, then annihilating, resistance ~ Anonymous,
277:The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come. Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual. It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,
278:If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It will initially suffer ridicule and even violence - yet ultimately it is undeniable. All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences. ~ Lauryn Hill,
279:The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard. Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available. ~ Jaron Lanier,
280:Liberals and leftists have been dismissing inconvenient facts by attacking motives for generations. In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Soviet spies and abettors attacked the motives of their accusers because the fact of their guilt was undeniable. In the 1960s, over a thousand psychiatrists who'd never even met Barry Goldwater signed a petition saying the GOP candidate was too mentally unstable to be president. ~ Jonah Goldberg,
281:We're at a time when we are being presented with undeniable changes in the global climate and fundamental issues that affect every single one of us, and it's the time we're listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. Which is fine, you know, but personally speaking, I can't do that. ~ Thom Yorke,
282:There is a distinct difference between the ability to create life and the innate need to protect it; to cherish it. The life you've created is the one being you love most in the universe, and that intense love evolves into something that goes far beyond a sense of duty. It is instinct; pure and undeniable. As a direct result, one must neglect all else to preserve it. Even those we have claimed to love before. ~ Jamie McGuire,
283:LIBERTY IS EQUALLY AS PRECIOUS TO A BLACK MAN, AS IT IS TO A WHITE ONE, AND BONDAGE EQUALLY AS INTOLERABLE TO THE ONE AS IT IS TO THE OTHER . . . . AN AFRICAN, OR A NEGRO MAY JUSTLY CHALLENGE, AND HAS AN UNDENIABLE RIGHT TO HIS LIBERTY: CONSEQUENTLY, THE PRACTISE OF SLAVE-KEEPING, WHICH SO MUCH ABOUNDS IN THIS LAND IS ILLICT. —ESSAY WRITTEN BY AFRICAN AMERICAN LEMUEL HAYNES, VETERAN OF THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON E ~ Laurie Halse Anderson,
284:Basically, even though Hannah admits that the decision to take her life was entirely her own, it’s also important to be aware of how we treat others. Even though someone appears to shrug off a sideways comment or to not be affected by a rumor, it’s impossible to know everything else going on in that person’s life, and how we might be adding to his/her pain. People do have an impact on the lives of others; that’s undeniable. ~ Jay Asher,
285:The writer whose words are going to be read by children has a heavy responsibility. And yet, despite the undeniable fact that the children’s minds are tender, they are also far more tough than many people realize, and they have an openness and an ability to grapple with difficult concepts which many adults have lost. Writers of children’s literature are set apart by their willingness to confront difficult questions. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
286:Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two! ~ David Sedaris,
287:Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are “We’re number two! ~ David Sedaris,
288:I personally believe the role of poets as poets (which is something different from our obligations as citizens, community members, humans) is to write poems. I believe this because I am quite sure poetry can do something no other form or writing, or human activity, can, at least not in such a powerful and distilled and undeniable way. And that we need this type of thinking for our survival as individuals and as a species. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
289:Nevertheless, these undeniable points of likeness, which suggest as at least a probable hypothesis that Aristotle may have possessed some knowledge of Nyaya , must not cause us to forget that there are essential differences between the two viewpoints ; for whereas the Greek syllogism, when all is said and done, bears only on the concepts or notions of things, the Hindu argument has a more direct bearing on things in themselves. ~ Ren Gu non,
290:It is not a lack of morality or any deep character flaw that creates addiction; it is almost always just a lot of pain and a lack of tolerance or compassion for this pain that get us stuck in the repetitive and habitual patterns of drinking, drugging, overeating, or whatever actions our addictions take. In some cases the underlying causes are not as clear, but the suffering that addiction creates is always obvious and undeniable. ~ Noah Levine,
291:What?"
"I said, Are you dangerous?"
I wasn't sure I heard her correctly. "Who? me? No, I'm not dangerous at all."
"You promise?"
"Sure."
"All right, then," she said. "You can get in."
And that was how I met the unsinkable, irrepressible, wholly undeniable Kikumi Otsugi, a woman who believed in bad men, but not bad dishonest men. I had given her my word of honor that I would not harm her, and she was satisfied. ~ Will Ferguson,
292:I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out. ~ William Styron,
293:There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies - the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden - as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. ~ Richard Flanagan,
294:The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough. Many have become wealthy peddling forecasting of untested value to corporate executives, government officials, and ordinary people who would never think of swallowing medicine of unknown efficacy and safety but who routinely pay for forecasts that are as dubious as elixirs sold from the back of a wagon. ~ Philip E Tetlock,
295:I knew life was not perfectly simple and luck was involved, but it was undeniable that hard work paid dividends and being lazy was not generally a good idea. I also believed that having hope and a general sense of optimism made one more likely to be aware of opportunities and take advantage of those opportunities when they existed. After all, a serial pessimist would have no reason to take a risk if he thought failure was the likely outcome. ~ Roy Huff,
296:It is the Holy Spirit who keeps us from this path and gives us confidence so we can enjoy intimacy with our Creator. Though I do not believe God gives us His Spirit solely for our personal benefit, it is undeniable that one of the greatest aspects of being in relationship with the Holy Spirit is the intimacy, security, and encouragement He brings us. It is then we can serve God as a beloved child rather than a stressed-out, guilt-ridden slave. ~ Francis Chan,
297:Unfortunately, every time someone said “debriefing,” the entire flock had one image: someone’s tighty-whities disappearing in a flash. We were smothering our giggles, but it was getting harder. Coupled with the whole “naval this, and naval that,” with its undeniable belly-button connotations, we were essentially turning into a sugar-jacked, sleep-deprived flock of incoherent, silly, recombinant-DNA goofballs. This was not going to end well. ~ James Patterson,
298:You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot. ~ Anne Rice,
299:GraceQuest is a gripping story of one man's (and his family's) struggle with tremendous weakness and pain, but it is also a narrative theodicy--defense of God's goodness in spite of the undeniable reality of evil. . . . This is an honest and hard-hitting book about God's grace in and through tremendous loss of health and strength. Readers will find hope and help here if they are open to its message about the God-given 'strength to suffer well.' ~ Roger E Olson,
300:thought that I’d given up on Mal. I thought the love I’d had for him belonged to the past, to the foolish, lonely girl I never wanted to be again. I’d tried to bury that girl and the love she’d felt, just as I’d tried to bury my power. But I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whatever burned between us was just as bright, just as undeniable. The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever. ~ Leigh Bardugo,
301:Meanwhile, NBC and I plan to continue our relationship with several new co-ventures including a new music show, while we also explore our ideas for me to create and host a new show of my own. I will not go quietly into the night... expect more great music and entertainment done in my own unique unmistakable and undeniable way. The Voice has given me all the altitude and incentive to do just that. Thanks for the memories and make way for many more! ~ Cee Lo Green,
302:I thought that I’d given up on Mal. I thought the love I’d had for him belonged to the past, to the foolish, lonely girl I never wanted to be again. I’d tried to bury that girl and the love she’d felt, just as I’d tried to bury my power. But I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whatever burned between us was just as bright, just as undeniable. The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever. ~ Leigh Bardugo,
303:Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography. ~ Cornel West,
304:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
305:She’d spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened—apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn’t a mystical place to be reached or won—some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it—but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness. With ~ Laini Taylor,
306:It is an undeniable fact that the universe is only knowable to us through the human minds ability to perceive reality. If all human knowledge is rooted in consciousness, perhaps we are viewing not the real universe based on limitations of the brain. This proposition leads to the conclusion that the apparent evolution of the cosmos since the Big Bang has been totally dependent upon human consciousness. We create reality in our own image as a collective dream. ~ Deepak Chopra,
307:I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. ~ Haruki Murakami,
308:This is the female form, vapor,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heavaen or fear'd of hell, are now consumed, Mad filament, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable... ~ Walt Whitman,
309:Belgian officials concluded that 'the Hutu-Tutsi question posed an undeniable problem' and proposed that official usage of the terms 'Hutu' and 'Tutsi' - on identity cards, for example - should be abolished. The Hutu, however, rejected the proposal, wanting to retain their identifiable majority; abolition of the identity cards would prevent 'the statistical law from establishing the reality of facts'. The idea gained ground that majority rule meant Hutu rule. ~ Martin Meredith,
310:Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it. Finally suppose he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong. What will happen? The individual will frequently emerge not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed he may even show a new fervor for converting other people to his view. ~ Brooke Gladstone,
311:I have never been able to understand how men can feel affection for individuals who are intent on massacring them in a variety of unpleasant ways, but it is an undeniable fact that they can and do. Witness the immortal verse of Mr. Kipling: "So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'home in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man!" One can only accept this as another example of the peculiar emotional aberrations of the male sex. ~ Elizabeth Peters,
312:Daily absorption in the physical actualities of nature is life as I need it to be: it means I am connected to such large things - sky, sea, hill, the vagaries of weather, the undeniable needs of animals - that I can disappear as a subject of interest, I can exist without self-consciousness. The city is a challenge for me, however thrilling a few days prove, for its insatiable overstimulation and the rarity of quiet. The city makes people bigger than they need to be. ~ Tilda Swinton,
313:Coincidences undeniably imply meaning.

I am rereading Hart Crane.
I notice the date
On which he stepped off that boat
Was April 26.

Tomorrow is April 26.

The year of his suicide was 1932.
I was four.
I am now fifty-one.
One undeniable implication in this case then
Is that the year, today,
Is 1979.

Afterward, Crane’s mother scrubbed floors.
Eventually, I may or may not
Jump overboard.

Are there questions? ~ David Markson,
314:At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story. The ~ Nancy Isenberg,
315:As my personal explorations continued, I experienced this quality of inner reality more and more and could no longer doubt that the meaning of God lay in this direction. At the same time, these undeniable experiences lit up and were in turn illuminated by all the philosophical and historical knowledge I had by then amassed and I began to understand in an entirely new way the teachings of both Judaism and Christianity as well as the teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. ~ Jacob Needleman,
316:Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry,5 but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard.6 Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available. ~ Jaron Lanier,
317:The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,
318:Boneless with relief, she let him pull her forward, into the open air, into his lap. And in this wild darkness, in the middle of an empty earth, she grieved for both of them—indeed, for every human in this wretched world, who must face the trials life offered, negotiate the changes wrought by time. There was so little joy to cling to, so few certainties. Yet humans continued to endure. Continued to hope. The undeniable compulsion to survive powered them onward, like Sisyphus on his mountain. ~ Meredith Duran,
319:In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable. ~ Anita Diament,
320:Would it be better if religions were to disappear? I have no idea. Since I do not have any confidence in the association of truth with virtue, I am not sure if the world would be a better place if people believed more true things. But what is undeniable is that we cannot understand our own culture unless we recognise that it was formed, for good or bad, as a Christian culture. It's an illusion that we could somehow recover a human essence which is independent of the way it was created by culture. ~ Tim Crane,
321:It was true that up until the end of the twentieth century it was men who wielded most of the power. This is undeniable. What cannot be readily ascertained is why this should have been so. Was it, as some have maintained, that from the dawn of history might was right and the physically stronger sex gained ascendancy over the weaker? Or was it, as others have claimed, that women’s horizons were narrower than men’s, thus by their very nature keeping them within the more limited confines of home and family? ~ Jean Ure,
322:It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, 'Oh, right.' The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother's lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she's still drinking. You have always known this. The only thing that's mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious. ~ Ariel Levy,
323:I don't go through a torturous intellectual process to decide what to direct. I know what I want to direct the second I read something or hear a story. I just know when it grabs me in a certain way I want to direct it. And then I spend the next four to six months trying to talk myself out of it, because directing is really hard! But it's true, I know essentially when and what I want to do next... it's an undeniable feeling I get and it's not the same feeling I get when I wind up producing something. ~ Steven Spielberg,
324:"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
325:When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes,
326:For me it was through that dance,” she answered. “Yes, but it’s not easy to deal with the loss of a loved one,” he said, thinking about his past. “I think it’s because we view death negatively. But we forget that life and death are simply two polarities of human experience. Because of our fear of letting go, we create a division between them. Yet the undeniable fact remains that both life and death are entwined at the core. We start dying the moment we are born,” she replied, passing him a piece of chocolate. ~ Brian Tracy,
327:The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance). ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
328:By simply stopping every day and registering our connection to this undeniable, unchanging Presence, we start to notice a deeper truth, a happier reality. We start to notice an eternal broadcast airing its joyful melody quietly beneath the static. No offense to Napoleon Hill, the author of the self-help classic on which my title riffs, but the real power is in not thinking. If you want to override your brain’s unfortunate habit of leafing through your past and creating a present hologram to match, forget thinking. ~ Pam Grout,
329:I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world... Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value. ~ G H Hardy,
330:It's a commonly expressed and rather nice, romantic notion that we are all "sisters" and "brothers."

Let's be real. Fact is, we might be better served to accept that we are all siblings.

Siblings fight, pull each other's hair, steal stuff, and accuse each other indiscriminately.

But siblings also know the undeniable fact that they are the same blood, share the same origins, and are family.

Even when they hate each other.

And that tends to put all things in perspective. ~ Vera Nazarian,
331:But when the Holy Spirit does His mysterious work of regeneration, the first thing that changes in a person is the disposition of his or her soul. Now he cares for the things of God and desires to seek God. Now there is an affection for God that was not there before. It is far from perfect, but it is real. Its origins and its power remain mysterious. But the reality is that the person's heart is beating for God, whereas it never did before. This is the undeniable effect of the blowing of the Pneuma through the soul. ~ R C Sproul,
332:You don't want me to feel obligated? Well, I'm sorry, Lily. I am here
because I feel obligated." He brought her hand to his chest, pressing her
palm flat against his rapidly thumping pulse. "I'm obligated by my heart. It's
decided you're essential to my existence, you see. And it's threatening to go out on labor strike if I don't make you mine this very day. So yes. I am here on bended knee, acting from a deep, undeniable sense of obligation. I am, quite simply, yours." He swallowed hard. "If you'll have me. ~ Tessa Dare,
333:Certain elements of today's ecological crisis reveal its moral character. First among these is the indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology. Many recent discoveries have brought undeniable benefits to humanity. Indeed, they demonstrate the nobility of the human vocation to participate responsibly in God's creative action in the world. Unfortunately, it is now clear that the application of these discoveries in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful long-term effects. ~ Pope John Paul II,
334:Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside of Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. ... Louis (XVI) hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop's value, made off in the night with the royal tubers. ~ Michael Pollan,
335:She was half afraid he was playing some kind of game with her, with all of them, except . . . it had to be real. The emotion on his face, the sincerity in his eyes, all of it was undeniable. But how could someone’s character alter so greatly? Perhaps, she mused, it wasn’t so much that Harry was being altered as he was being revealed . . . layer by layer, the defenses coming off. Perhaps Harry was becoming—or would become in time—the man he had always been meant to be. Because he had finally found someone who mattered. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
336:But I have to do something, and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had—photography courses and cookery classes—when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it—there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you ~ Paula Hawkins,
337:But I have to do something, and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had—photography courses and cookery classes—when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it—there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you. ~ Paula Hawkins,
338:One thing, however, did become clear to him—why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing—mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery. ~ Hermann Hesse,
339:It is undeniable that the source of all our miseries comes from our obstinacy in maintaining that Paradise is a garden. The psychoanalysts have added to the confusion by interpreting the floating dreams as a flight into space. The mystic is the only one who knows that all states of ecstasy are a state of floating in an ambiance more heavy than air. Paradise is at the bottom of the sea, and I can also prove to you that angels are ships. They have no wings but large sails which they unfold noiselessly at night to cross eternity. ~ Ana s Nin,
340:She'd spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened--apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness.
With hope that the weapons could in time vanish from the picture. ~ Laini Taylor,
341:I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. ~ Haruki Murakami,
342:In Western philosophical terminology, the nondual Tantrik View is considered ‘idealism’ (as opposed to ‘realism’), since it argues that everything is internal to Awareness and is an expression of the same. Regardless of how it’s labeled, the fundamental point here is undeniable: we can be sure that objects of experience are internal to awareness, but we cannot be sure that they have any existence external to awareness, and it is pointless to speculate anyway, since all we have access to are the contents of awareness. ~ Christopher D Wallis,
343:Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervour about convincing and converting other people to his view. ~ John N Gray,
344:The shadow’s potential to destroy is undeniable. Lightning might strike a house and set it ablaze. But harness the electricity and the same house can be illuminated with the turn of a switch. Consider a vaccine. Included in the serum is a small amount of the disease. Light needs the dark. It is the order of the universe. What would thaw in the spring if we didn’t have a winter to endure? Consciousness is conditioned against its absence, Jung wrote. Amputate the serpent’s tail and the power to heal lies within.” Anna ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum,
345:There is an undeniable economic and cultural disconnect between many of those who volunteer to serve and those who choose to remain civilians. But what is more concerning to me is the disconnect between our political leadership that applauds our soldiers and veterans, but then won't provide funding to properly armored vehicles or health care when our servicemen and women come home. You can't send men and women to war without being prepared to take care of them abroad and give them the services they need when they return home. ~ Ruben Gallego,
346:There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies—the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other’s breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden—as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. ~ Richard Flanagan,
347:The first undeniable reality is that every living thing dies, and the second undeniable reality is that we suffer throughout our lives because we don't understand death. The truth derived from these two points is the importance of clarifying the matter of birth and death. The third undeniable reality is that all of the thoughts and feelings that arise in my head simply arise haphazardly, by chance. And the conclusion we can derive from that is not to hold on to all that comes up in our head. That is what we are doing when we sit zazen. ~ Kosho Uchiyama,
348:The state is the guarantor, but not the creator, of social relationships. It represents and unifies capital, it is neither capital’s motor nor its centrepiece. From the undeniable fact that the Spanish masses were armed after July 1936, anarchism deduced that the state was losing its substance. But the substance of the state resides not in institutional forms, but in its unifying function. The state ensures the tie which human beings cannot and dare not create among themselves, and creates a web of services which are both parasitic and real. ~ Anonymous,
349:If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it's that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records, I don't hear it now the way I did when I was 20. I think it is undeniable that the songs have become more instantaneously descriptive and literal. I'd like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack. I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase. ~ Ben Gibbard,
350:For me, the entire journey of Lost has been walking that fine line between discovering Sawyer's humanity and, yet, keeping his edge of anger and destructiveness. He's been through every situation possible, emotionally and physically. Sometimes, it's been scary to get in touch with his growth, especially his relationship with Juliet. I really thought the audience might reject the softer side of Sawyer we saw in that. As for what will happen with him and Kate, all I can say is they have a love that is undeniable, but maybe it must be denied. ~ Josh Holloway,
351:He smiled too, but did not hold her gaze. She watched as he put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, and wondered again who he was, who he really was. What happened to you? What could have been so bad? As she watched, she was struck by the undeniable sense that behind his introverted, self-effacing demeanor was a tireless mind churning with thought and memory, self-sustained like the constant machinations of a kinetic engine; and much like his two differently colored eyes, she also sensed that there were two just as different sides to him. ~ Sean J Quirk,
352:The old and oft-repeated proposition "Totum est majus sua parte" [the whole is larger than the part] may be applied without proof only in the case of entities that are based upon whole and part; then and only then is it an undeniable consequence of the concepts "totum" and "pars". Unfortunately, however, this "axiom" is used innumerably often without any basis and in neglect of the necessary distinction between "reality" and "quantity", on the one hand, and "number" and "set", on the other, precisely in the sense in which it is generally false. ~ Georg Cantor,
353:The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos ... The pre-Christian God Mithras ... had his birthday celebrated on December 25 ... Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans ... Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagans' veneration of the day of the sun ... To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god's weekly tribute- Sunday. ~ Dan Brown,
354:Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge 'There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.' On one level, when you 'step out of yourself' and see yourself as 'just another human being', it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life... ~ Douglas R Hofstadter,
355:He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.

("Pollock And The Porrah Man") ~ H G Wells,
356:Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered—either by themselves or by others.” -Mark Twain If I could write one sentence that would magically increase your IQ by thirty points, would you be interested in reading that sentence? Probably. But why? What would be in it for you? Do you think it would help you make more money? Make a name for yourself? Find love, happiness, or fulfillment? I’ve asked many people these questions and their answers are invariable. “Of course it would.” The cultural correlation is undeniable: we’ve been indoctrinated to believe ~ Sean Patrick,
357:What held real value in this world? In any world? Friendship, the gifts of love and compassion. The honour one accorded the life of another person. None of this could be bought with wealth. It seemed to him such a simple truth. Yet he knew that its very banality was fuel for sneering cynicism and mockery. Until such things were taken away, until the price of their loss came to be personal, in some terrible, devastating arrival into one’s life. Only at that moment of profound extremity did the contempt wash down from that truth, revealing it bare, undeniable. ~ Steven Erikson,
358:Increasing knowledge is important, but we must also remember that we already know far more than we are willing or able to apply. The human race is not wandering in darkness without guidance or direction. It is not necessary to be universally enlightened in order to live a constructive code. The conflict is in the individual. He must decide for himself the degree to which he is willing to control and re-educate his own appetites and instincts. The inducements to per­sonality reorientation are real, evident, and undeniable. ~ Manly P. Hall, Horizon Magazine, Winter 1950, p. 16,
359:Love is a feeling, a real, raw, and unscripted emotion so sensationally pure, unable to dull even under the strain of a world against it, strong enough to heal the broken and warm even the coldest of hearts.
Innate.
Unavoidable.
Undeniable.
And sometimes, love is unconventional and it breaks all the rules and blurs all the lines and basks in its glory, shining as bright as the sun, unapologetically glowing even under the narrowed stares of society and its screaming, self-righteous morals, berating and judging that which it doesn’t understand. ~ Madeline Sheehan,
360:The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion. ~ H G Wells,
361:While it is undeniable that many have been driven to immorality and crime by the need to survive, it is equally evident that the possession of a significant surplus of material goods has never been a guarantee against covetousness, rapacity and the infinite variety of vice and pain which spring from such passions. Indeed, it could be argued that the unrelenting compulsion of those who already have much to acquire even more has generated greater injustice, immorality and wretchedness than the cumulative effect of the struggles of the severely underprivileged to better their lot. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi,
362:Good,” she replied. “That’s why you show promise. Not only are you able to recognize your shortcomings, you have an undeniable hunger to change for the better and evolve. What’s truly amazing is what you’ve become in so short a time. Most humans would have imploded after a fraction of what you’ve lived through.” “Guess it comes from being stuck in a moment for so long, treading water and losing ground no matter how hard I swam. It’s almost as if the current has shifted and now I’m swimming at blazing speeds like some human version of the Nautilus that has slipped into the Gulf Stream. ~ J D Estrada,
363:Never, until then, had life happened to me by day. Never in sunlight. Only in my nights did the world slowly revolve. Only that, whatever happened in the dark of night itself, would also happen at the same time in my own entrails, and my dark wasn't differentiated from the dark outside, and in the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was still a surface: the secret life of the night soon reduced in my mouth to the taste of a nightmare that disappears. but now life was happening by day. undeniable and to be seen. unless I averted my eyes.

and I could still avert my eyes. ~ Clarice Lispector,
364:I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it was time for me to be on my own. But what had I learned so far that would help me to make a living? Nothing. I could be a porter like my father before me, but what else? And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard. What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things? What kind of life was possible under that hate? How had this ~ Richard Wright,
365:It is an undeniable fact of biology that our brains are strictly limited, like the brains of all other creatures. Every brain must suffer from cognitive closure with regard to a host of issues that are simply beyond it, unimaginable and unfathomable. We don't have a miraculous res cognitans between our ears, but just lots of brain tissue subjects to the laws of physics and biology.

It would be profoundly unbiological-wouldn't it?-to suppose that our human brains were somewhat exempt from these natural limits. Such delusions of grandeur are obsolete relics from our prescientific past. ~ Noam Chomsky,
366:Add together the collective global impact of population, consumption, the global economy, and technology and it is clear how we have become a geological force. Human activity has so disrupted processes on the planet with consequences that what were once called "acts of god" or "natural disasters" now carry the undeniable imprint of our species. We have become almost like gods as we affect natural events such as weather and climate, earthquakes, floods, drought, mega-fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Once, our fear of gods acted to restrain human excesses, but now we have ourselves become the gods. ~ David Suzuki,
367:Beli, who'd been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam's cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had. Dios mío, La Inca said every time the girl headed out. Why would God give you that burden in this country of all places! ~ Junot D az,
368:enrolled in the university counseling service. I was assigned to a sprightly middle-aged woman with tight curls and sharp eyes, who rarely spoke in our sessions, preferring to let me talk it out, which I did, week after week, month after month. The counseling did nothing at first—I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful”—but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself. ~ Tara Westover,
369:were identified “as located within individuals” and overlooked the “undeniable social causation of many such problems.” 30 This was in addition to a flood of protest from American professionals, including leaders of the American Psychological Association and the American Counseling Association. Why are relationships or social conditions left out? 31 If you pay attention only to faulty biology and defective genes as the cause of mental problems and ignore abandonment, abuse, and deprivation, you are likely to run into as many dead ends as previous generations did blaming it all on terrible mothers. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,
370:The “Howard” in the entry had to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft, that twentieth-century puritanic Poe from Providence, with his regrettable but undeniable loathing of the immigrant swarms he felt were threatening the traditions and monuments of his beloved New England and the whole Eastern seaboard. (And hadn’t Lovecraft done some ghost-writing for a man with a name like Castries? Caster? Carswell?) ~ Fritz Leiber,
371:It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. you feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. ~ Yann Martel,
372:I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’ — he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. In fact, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it. ~ George Saunders,
373:Within five years, the effects of the civil rights revolution were undeniable. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in the South soared. In Alabama the rate leaped from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent; in Louisiana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent. Suddenly black children could shop in department stores, eat at restaurants, drink from water fountains, and go to amusement parks that were once off-limits. Miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, and the rate of interracial marriage climbed. ~ Michelle Alexander,
374:Maybe she’s beautiful because she looks like she went ten fuckin’ rounds in the ring with Tyson and she’s still comin’ out swinging. The longer I stare at her, the more I come to understand this. I begin to understand why I saved her, because on some level I saw in her what I’ve only ever seen in one other person: fight. Not self-preservation, or the need to beat the shit outta someone like my brothers do on a daily basis, but fight, as if every cell in her body was made up of it, and it’s fucking glorious. Even bruised and filthy and as physically defeated as she is, this crazy bitch is beautiful. Even in sleep, her fight is undeniable. ~ Anonymous,
375:But when, from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: 'Here I stand; I can no other,' a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment, everything was made plain to her. She felt instantly that she understood the meaning of life - as far as it concerned her. Amazing to see clearly for the first time. Now everything was explained. How simple it was for her to realize that she herself was the centre of her own universe. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence. ~ Anna Kavan,
376:My father felt it his duty to continue to treat animals long after he stopped getting paid. He couldn’t stand by and watch a horse colic or a cow labor with a breech calf even though it meant personal ruin. The parallel is undeniable. There is no question that I am the only thing standing between these animals and the business practices of August and Uncle Al, and what my father would do—what my father would want me to do—is look after them, and I am filled with that absolute and unwavering conviction. No matter what I did last night, I cannot leave these animals. I am their shepherd, their protector. And it’s more than a duty. It’s a covenant with my father. ~ Sara Gruen,
377:My father felt it was his duty to continue to treat animals long after he stopped getting paid. He couldn't stand by and watch a horse colic or a cow labor with a breech calf even though it meant personal ruin. The parallel is undeniable. There is no question I am the only thing standing between these animals and the business practices of August and Uncle Al, and what my father would do - what my father would want me to do - is look after them, and I am filled with that absolute and unwavering conviction. No matter what I did last night, I cannot leave these animals. I am their shepherd, their protector. And it's more than a duty. It's a covenant with my father. ~ Sara Gruen,
378:It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155,
379:Unlike many parts of the world where fate is considered to be something that lies beyond the reach of average humans, in the US fate is considered to be something that is resoundingly within the realm of every single person’s control. Failure is an individual problem, not a collective, cultural, or political problem. The idea is that if you don’t have something, it is because you didn’t want it badly enough, or you didn’t try hard enough. Though the allure of this idea is undeniable, there isn’t much room for serious considerations of justice or historical unfairness in this narrative. But it is this fantasy—the American Dream—that is the siren song for so many. ~ Virgie Tovar,
380:It opens, the gate to the garden
with the docility of a page
that frequent devotion questions
and inside, my gaze
has no need to fix on objects
that already exist, exact, in memory.
I know the customs and souls
and that dialect of allusions
that every human gathering goes weaving.
I've no need to speak
nor claim false privilege;
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness.
This is to reach the highest thing,
that Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones and trees.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, Simplicity
,
381:I once asked Randy how he knew that he had fallen in love with his girlfriend, Amy, and he just looked at me like it was the hardest question in the world. I expected some floral, florid explanation, about the air lightening and flute music filling his ears. This relationship that had him so transfixed—I expected a masterpiece of sentiment, one that would make me so happy for him and so empty inside. Instead he just turned to me and said,

“The minute I knew I was in love was the minute when there was no question about it. One night I was lying in the dark, looking at her looking at me, and it just was there, undeniable.”

There is no question about it. ~ David Levithan,
382:Believing himself to be unseen by other bathers, he gave himself up to being alone with his body. He wriggled his toes, breathed hard through his nose, twisted his brown moustache where some drops of water still clung, and looked himself critically all over. The scrutiny seemed to satisfy him, as well as it might. I, whose only acquaintance was with bodies and minds developing, was suddenly confronted by maturity in its most undeniable form; and I wondered, what must it feel like to be him, master of those limbs which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field, and exist for their own beauty and strength? What can they do, I thought, to be conscious of themselves? ~ L P Hartley,
383:voice bringing my defenses down. I’d never have expected it a year ago, but now . . . after seeing him lose everything to follow his heart, I could. I could accept his comfort, show my vulnerability—even if it might not last. The undeniable truth was, he was meant for better things than me. One day Ellasbeth would have him, and I’d be left with the memory of who he had wanted to be. “Rachel?” But I’d be damned if I didn’t take what I could of the time we had. Catching my tears, I wiped my face, giving Trent a thankful smile as I pulled back and looked for Bis. The little gargoyle had his wings draped around him, looking like a devil himself. “Bis? Can you jump her to Trent’s? ~ Kim Harrison,
384:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end. The day will come when, after mastering the ether, the winds, the tides, gravity, we shall master the energies of love, for God. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have made fire his servant. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
385:Ebert’s achievement in steering the Weimar Republic into being was undeniable. Yet he made many hasty compromises that were to return to haunt the Republic in different ways later on. His concern for a smooth transition from war to peace led him to collaborate closely with the army without demanding any changes in its fiercely monarchist and ultra-conservative officer corps, which he was certainly in a position to do in 1918-19. Yet Ebert’s willingness to compromise with the old order did not do anything to endear him to those who regretted its passing. Throughout the years of his Presidency, he was subjected to a remorseless campaign of vilification in the right-wing press. ~ Richard J Evans,
386:When I heard this story, I made the only good decision I had made for months: I enrolled in the university counseling service. I was assigned to a sprightly middle-aged woman with tight curls and sharp eyes, who rarely spoke in our sessions, preferring to let me talk it out, which I did, week after week, month after month. The counseling did nothing at first—I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful”—but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself. ~ Tara Westover,
387:The First World War; the Russian revolution of 1917; Hitler's revolution of 1933; the second World War; the further development of revolutionary wars since 1944 in China, Indochina, and Algeria, as well as the Cold War—each was a step in the development of modern propaganda. With each of these events propaganda developed further, increased in depth, discovered new methods. At the same time it conquered new nations and new territories: To reach the enemy, one must use his weapons; this undeniable argument is the key to the systematic development of propaganda. And in this way propaganda has become a permanent feature in nations that actually despise it, such as the United States and France. ~ Jacques Ellul,
388:We have staked it all on this—that life wins. Oh, dear friends—life wins. Life wins. Sometimes now, especially if we will pray. But life wins fully, and very soon. Just as we must fix our eyes on Jesus when we pray, we must also fix our hearts on this one undeniable truth: life will win. When you know that unending joy is about to be yours, you live with such an unshakable confidence it will almost be a swagger. You can pray boldly, without fear, knowing that, “If this doesn’t work now, it will work totally and completely very soon.” We can have that kingdom attitude of Daniel’s friends, who said, “God is able to deliver, and he will deliver. But if not . . .” we will not lose heart. Period. ~ John Eldredge,
389:Wisdom tells us secrets before we have a right to know them. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to pray for wisdom or make yourself worthy of it. As with the concept of grace in the New Testament, which falls like rain on the just and the unjust alike, the ultimate truth simply is. When we catch a glimpse of it, we become more real in ourselves.

It is undeniable that the outward appearance of life contains suffering and distress. Wisdom reveals that suffering comes and goes while a deeper reality never changes. That reality is founded on truth and love.

Faith makes life better because in the midst of pain and suffering, we need to trust that something else is more powerful. ~ Deepak Chopra,
390:I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands that were making the music when this decision was made simply disappeared and got real jobs, the ones that survived made different music that appealed to more people. The result was that when I listened to that music it felt a bit like travelling to the past or visiting ghosts, and this despite the undeniable fact that a very healthy portion of the music I listened to otherwise was created a far longer time ago, by people long-departed, yet produced no similar feelings. ~ Sergio de la Pava,
391:He had had to be father and mother to her, and he had taken to his tasks with determination, seeking perfection in everything he did. Now, as an adult, she realized how hard her mother's death had been for him, understood the enormity of his loss. The love that her parents had shared had been a beacon of light for her in a dark and dangerous world. She wondered if she would ever have the chance to find such a love herself. As her father talked excitedly about the latest young horse he had bred, Megan saw the years fall away from his face and the lingering sadness lift a little. She owed him everything- her resourcefulness, her skills as a horsewoman, her knowledge of medicinal herbs, as well as her undeniable stubbornness. ~ Paula Brackston,
392:So, how many generations of Indebted need to suffer – even as the civilized trappings multiply and abound on all sides, with an ever-increasing proportion of those material follies out of their financial reach? How many, before we all collectively stop and say, “Aaii! That’s enough! No more suffering, please! No more hunger, no more war, no more inequity!” Well, as far as I can see, there are never enough generations. We just scrabble on, and on, devouring all within reach, including our own kind, as if it was nothing more than the undeniable expression of some natural law, and as such subject to no moral context, no ethical constraint – despite the ubiquitous and disingenuous blathering over-invocation of those two grand notions. ~ Steven Erikson,
393:The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others that will have an even shorter life - a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything. We refer here of course to speculative science, insofar as this still exists; in applied science there are on the contrary undeniable results, and this is easily understandable since these results bear directly on the domain of matter. ~ Ren Gu non,
394:I gradually begin a desk to sink into that condition which is so common with me at night in my illness, and which I call mystic care. It is the most oppressive, agonising state of terror of something that I cannot define, something ungraspable and outside of the natural order of things, but which may yet take shape this very minute, as though in mockery of all the conclusions of reason, and come to me and stand before me as an undeniable fact, hideous, horrible, and relentless… In spite of all the protests of reason, The mind loses all power of resistance. It is unheeded, it becomes useless, and this inward division intensifies the agony of suspense. It seems to me something like the anguish of people who are afraid of the dead. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
395:Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.

Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?

It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures. ~ Jaron Lanier,
396:What Laura regrets, what she can hardly bear, is the cake. It embarrasses her, but she can’t deny it. It’s only sugar, flour, and eggs—part of a cake’s charm is its inevitable imperfections. She knows that; of course she does. Still she had hoped to create something finer, something more significant, than what she’s produced, even with its smooth surface and its centered message. She wants (she admits to herself ) a dream of a cake manifested as an actual cake; a cake invested with an undeniable and profound sense of comfort, of bounty. She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while. She wants to have produced something marvelous; something that would be marvelous even to those who do not love her. ========== ~ Anonymous,
397:Poets could speak knowingly of metaphors; if life is walking, then running is a life’s entire span speeded up, and to act out birth to death in a single day, over and over again, has the flavour of perfect habit, for it mimicks undeniable truths. Small deaths paying homage to the real one. We choose them in myriad forms and delight in the ritual. I could run until I wear out. Every joint, every bone and every muscle. I could run until my heart groans older than its years, and finally bursts. I could damn the poets and make the metaphor real. We are all self-destructive. It is integral to our nature. And we will run even when there’s nowhere to run to, and nothing terrible to run from. Why? Because to walk is just as meaningless. It just takes longer. ~ Steven Erikson,
398:Starbucks is in every state. Whether people like the company or not, we are an undeniable presence in communities, on the ground across America. I always tried to spend as much time as I could on that ground and in our stores, talking to partners and customers—and listening more than I spoke. Among the things I’ve learned is that the cliché is true: most people do share the same desires—to be valued, to be understood, to be loved, to have a chance to go after our dreams, however humble or audacious those dreams may be. Beyond that, I’ve come to believe that the majority of people have potential that is easy to overlook, but that when tapped is boundless. Most people I have met in America want to be in control of their own fate. They just need a chance. ~ Howard Schultz,
399:The semanticists maintained that everything depends on how you interpret the words “potato,” “is” and “moving.” Since the key here is the operational copula “is,” one must examine “is” rigorously. Whereupon they set to work on an Encyclopedia of Cosmic Semasiology, devoting the first four volumes to a discussion of the operational referents of “is.” The neopositivists maintained that it is not clusters of potatoes one directly perceives, but clusters of sensory impressions. Then, employing symbolic logic, they created terms for “cluster of impressions” and “cluster of potatoes,” devised a special calculus of propositions all in algebraic signs and after using up several seas of ink reached the mathematically precise and absolutely undeniable conclusion that 0=0. ~ Stanis aw Lem,
400:To Muslims, I repeat that Islam is a great and noble religion but that all Muslims and Muslim majority societies did not in the past and do not now live up to this nobleness: critical reflection is required about faithfulness to our principles, our outlook on others, on cultures, freedom, the situation of women, and so on. Our contradictions and ambiguities are countless. To Westerners, I similarly repeat that the undeniable achievements of freedom and democracy should not make us forget murderous “civilizing missions,” colonization, the destructive economic order, racism, discrimination, acquiescent relations with the worst dictatorships, and other failings. Our contradictions and ambiguities are countless. I am equally demanding and rigorous with both universes. ~ Tariq Ramadan,
401:If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies;

If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is an ecological disaster;

If you embrace nonviolence but are not a vegan, then words of nonviolence come out of your mouth as the products of torture and death go into it;

If you claim to love animals but you are eating them or products made from them, or otherwise consuming them, you see loving as consistent with harming that which you claim to love.

Stop trying to make excuses. There are no good ones to make. Go vegan. ~ Gary L Francione,
402:But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance. Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble eminent statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies, corroborates, explains each separate piece. ~ Arthur Machen,
403:What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America. Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart. ~ Charles P Pierce,
404:Snorting, Maris swept his gaze over some of the handful of people who meant everything to him. No, they weren’t related by blood. But they were bound by something a lot stronger, and more powerful. Mutual love and respect. And that was the only thing in the universe that was truly indestructible. He’d spent the whole of his life trying to find someplace he belonged. Now he had it, and it was so much better than any of his dreams. No, the people around him weren’t perfect. Neither was he. But they tried and they loved him. Just as he loved them. That was all that really mattered. It was the best anyone could hope for and right now, he knew one undeniable truth…. He really was the luckiest bitch in the universe. And as long as he had Ture and their son with him, nothing else would ever matter more. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,
405:Iran is the only country in the Middle East where a former head of state has stepped down from power at the end of his constitutionally mandated term of office and continues to live peacefully in his own home. The undeniable and serious flaws in their country’s electoral process have not prevented Iranians from learning about democratic practices and internalizing democracy-friendly values. Indeed, the debate over democracy has been near the heart of Iranian politics for a decade now. The years since the early 1990s have also been a time of intense discussions about religious reform in Iran. A group of Shia intellectuals, including some clerics, have questioned the authoritarian bent of Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih and argued for both limiting the powers of Iran’s clerical leaders and reconciling religion with democracy. ~ Vali Nasr,
406:Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid down. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. ~ Yann Martel,
407:Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. ~ Ford Madox Ford,
408:That right will ultimately triumph, is undeniable; and that the black magician will fall victim to his own excess, is a literal truth; but many must bow their heads to the tyrant while he passes, and only those who are strong are in safety. Individuals who have mastered nature's forces to such a degree that they can stop the heartbeat of a person on the other side of the earth with a mental ray, or burn a two-inch hole through a foot and a half of ebony with astral fire, are dangerous whenever met, and the average so-called good person has absolutely no chance of withstanding the blows of black magic. Only fools underestimate this danger; wise men protect themselves against it, for an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The white ray places the shield of David between them and the dark forces, and in this way they protect themselves,
409:Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you — seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call! ~ Bryant McGill,
410:The bold code of the transhumanist will rise. That's an inevitable, undeniable fact. It's embedded in the undemocratic nature of technology and our own teleological evolutionary advancment. It is the future. We are the future like it or not. And it needs to molded, guided, and handled correctly by the strength and wisdom of transhumanist scientists with their nations and resources standing behind them, facilitating them. It needs to be supported in a way that we can make a successful transition into it, and not sacrifice ourselves—either by its overwhelming power or by a fear of harnessing that power. You need to put your resources into the technology. Into our education system. Into our universities, industries, and ideas. Into the strongest of our society. Into the brightest of our society. Into the best of our society So that we can attain the future. ~ Zoltan Istvan,
411:Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The abnormal effort that can be diverted or divided. We all know the story of Coleridge and the Man from Porlock. What of the woman writer and a whole family of Porlocks?

For most of us the dilemma is rhetorical but those women who are driven with consummate energy through a single undeniable channel should be applauded and supported as vigorously as the men who have been setting themselves apart for centuries. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
412:Your problem is that you have never fully understood the power of being a desired woman.” My mind flashes back to a night in Robert’s bed. I had climbed on top of him, refused him until he said, “Please.” Asha smiles, reading my mind. “Power between the sheets means nothing if you don’t learn to extend its reach outside of the bedroom.” I look away. The room seems to be getting colder. I rub the back of my arms for warmth. “You don’t have to believe me,” Asha continues. “It’s in the stories of your religion. Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Salome and her dance of the Seven Veils: they all speak to the same undeniable truth. If a woman truly wants something, whether it’s having her man bite into an apple, bringing a divinely appointed superhero to his knees, or a Baptist’s head on a silver platter, she can have it. A woman can have anything if she knows how to use what God gave her. ~ Kyra Davis,
413:Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges.
She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero.
Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for.
Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end.
Albert. She still didn’t know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert.
If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn’t know what to do with the Perdido survivors? ~ Michael Grant,
414:The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations . . . . Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing . . . . It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. ~ Robert Lanza,
415:I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. ~ Yann Martel,
416:I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I now. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. ~ Yann Martel,
417:She looked away from him, her expression suddenly contemplative, the edges of her teeth catching at the plush curve of her lower lip. Just as Gideon thought she was going to refuse him, she reached out impulsively, her warm fingers catching at his. He held her hand as if he cradled a fragile bird in his palm, and drew her close enough that he could smell the hint of rose water in her hair. Her body was slim, sweetly curved, her uncorseted waist soft beneath his fingers. Despite the undeniable romance of the moment, Gideon felt a most unromantic stirring of lust as his body reacted with typical mare awareness to the nearness of a desirable female. He eased his partner into a slow waltz, guiding her expertly across the uneven flagstones.
"I've seen fairies dancing on the lawn before," he said, "when I get deep enough in a bottle of brandy. But I've never actually danced with one before. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
418:I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know it. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. ~ Yann Martel,
419:The raw urgency in Rob’s voice sent fresh blood flooding into Emily’s already swollen sex. She squirmed. feeling her orgasm approaching. Fast.
“Say it again,” Rob ground out, dragging one hand up her torso until his fingers found her breast. He cupped its weight, worshipping its form through the soft fabric of her dress.
She gasped again, arching her back. “I want you,” she panted, the sensations his fingers on her breast created almost stealing her ability to speak. “I want you. I have from the very—”
He didn’t let her finish. His lips claimed hers, his hand squeezing and massaging her breast as his tongue plundered her mouth. He pinched her nipple with hungry force, his tongue matching the ferocity of the caress. Her body burned with pleasure at his feverish actions, the undeniable desire each stoke of his tongue, each flick of his fingers wrought on her body pushing her closer and closer to eruption. ~ Lexxie Couper,
420:Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a policeman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had ~ Laura Thompson,
421:MOST CITIES ARE designed on grids that fill them with hard angles. Not Amsterdam, which has a softness about it imparted by the watery curves of the 16th-century canals that fan out through the city. Though its gabled canal houses and narrow medieval streets give it an undeniable old-world charm, Amsterdam’s thoroughly contemporary takes on arts, architecture and design show that it has modernity in a firm embrace. It’s a city that invites wandering, with a tram system and a plenitude of bicycles (about as many as there are residents) that make navigating as fun as it is easy. Thanks to the locals, most of whom speak English, you’ll feel instantly welcome and will be spared the indignity of trying to pronounce Dutch (don’t even try). Spend as much time as possible on foot, the better to enjoy the city’s theatrical quality: The huge, unshaded windows of the canal homes allow you to peer right in, testimony to the Dutch ethos of having nothing to hide. ~ Anonymous,
422:Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a policeman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had done as a child with her father. ~ Laura Thompson,
423:So the first time she and Leo combusted, she'd practically been poised for the breakup. In some inexplicable way, she'd been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn't there something nearly lovely–when you were young enough–about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse? She recognized the undeniable satisfaction of the first emotional fissure because an unraveling was still something grown-up and, therefore, life affirming. See? The broken heart signalled. I loved enough to lose; I felt enough to weep. Because when you were young enough, the stakes of love were so very small, nearly insignificant. How tragic could a breakup be when it was part of the fabric of expectation from the beginning? The hackneyed fights, the late-night phone calls, the indignant recounting for friends over multiple drinks and in earshot of an appropriately flirtatious bartender–it was theatre for a certain type of person . . . Until it wasn't. ~ Cynthia D Aprix Sweeney,
424:She let the relaxing song waft over and through her as she lost herself in everything around her: the millions of stars glittering above, the soft quilt beneath her, the man whose hand slipped warmly into hers. And she began to understand something she hadn't only a few short minutes before; she began to feel a certain, undeniable truth seeping into her skin, her muscles, her very bones.

And when the song came to its sweet, peaceful conclusion, she continued peering up at the sky even as she leaned her head over to rest it on Lucky's shoulder. And she whispered, "You love me."

He kept gazing upward, too, his answer coming softly. "Yeah, I do."

And it sounded ... like it wasn't a surprise to him at all.

The new knowledge made Tessa's skin tingle even as her body filled with warmth. And she pulled back just slightly to peer over at him, this man who loved her. He hadn't put it into words, but he hadn't needed to---because he'd shown her, in so many sweet ways. ~ Toni Blake,
425:The way of even the most justifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolued him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent -- that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procurred for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige, that was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind -- the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience. ~ Joseph Conrad,
426:When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it's always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are the people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies. My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that's confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we've done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs, and little remarks such as "We saved your ass in World War II." Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are "We're number two! ~ David Sedaris,
427:It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.” When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable. You play Abel to their Cain. You remind them that they ceased caring not because of life’s horrors, which are undeniable, but because they do not want to lift the world up on to their shoulders, where it belongs. Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity. Make friends with people who want the best for you. ~ Jordan Peterson,
428:It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.” When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable. You play Abel to their Cain. You remind them that they ceased caring not because of life’s horrors, which are undeniable, but because they do not want to lift the world up on to their shoulders, where it belongs. Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity. Make friends with people who want the best for you. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
429:I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.

Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it. ~ Haruki Murakami,
430:He saw tears rimming her blue eyes, tears that washed away Drizzt's anger, that told him that what had happened between himself and Catti-brie had apparently not been so deeply buried. The last time they had met, on this very spot, they had hidden the questions they both wanted to ask behind the energy of a sparring match. Catti-brie's concentration had to be complete on that occasion, and in the days before it, as she had fought to master her sword, but now that task was completed. Now, like Drizzt, she had time to think, and in that time, Catti-brie had remembered.

"Ye're knowing it was the sword?" she asked, almost pleaded.

Drizzt smiled, trying to comfort her. Of course it had been the sentient sword that had inspired her to throw herself at him. Fully the sword, only the sword. But a large part of Drizzt - and possibly of Catti-brie, he thought in looking at her - wished differently. There had been an undeniable tension between them for some time, a complicated situation, and even more so now, after the possession incident with Khazid'hea. ~ R A Salvatore,
431:Throughout my years with Obama, I publicly deflected questions about whether the vehemence of his opposition was rooted in race. “I’m sure some people voted for the president because he is black and some people voted against him because he is black,” I would say, with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime working with minority candidates to knock down racial barriers that blocked higher offices. “The election of the first black president was a dramatic step forward for America, not a magic healing elixir.” I simply didn’t want to fuel the discussion or appear to be setting the president up as a victim. Still, the truth is undeniable. No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than ~ David Axelrod,
432:Patriotism is a thing difficult to put into words. It is neither precisely an emotion nor an opinion, nor a mandate, but a state of mind -- a reflection of our own personal sense of worth, and respect for our roots. Love of country plays a part, but it's not merely love. Neither is it pride, although pride too is one of the ingredients.

Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all. And it's a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings -- our school, team, city, state, our immediate society -- often ultimately delineated by our ethnic roots and borders... but not always.

Indeed, these border lines are so fluid... And we do not pay allegiance as much as we resonate with a shared spirit.

We all feel an undeniable bond with the land where we were born. And yet, if we leave it for another, we grow to feel a similar bond, often of a more complex nature. Both are forms of patriotism -- the first, involuntary, by birth, the second by choice.

Neither is less worthy than the other.

But one is earned. ~ Vera Nazarian,
433:The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can’t polish what you haven’t written.

Things that made for a normal life—like a daily routine that followed the sun—took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn’t a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep.

He would often awake with a new idea—as if he’d merely been on a break and not unconscious—and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot’s seat in a ship that could go anywhere. ~ Vincent H O Neil,
434:Maman had been a gifted writer. Pari has read every word Maman had written in French and every poem she had translated from Farsi as well. The power and beauty of her writing was undeniable. But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician, with a pen for a wand, able to move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even possible?
Pari does not know—she does not know. And that, perhaps, may have been Maman’s true intent, to shift the ground beneath Pari’s feet. To intentionally unsteady and upend her, to turn her into a stranger to herself, to heave the weight of doubt on her mind, on all Pari thought she knew of her life, to make her feel as lost as if she were wandering through a desert at night, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, the truth elusive, like a single tiny glint of light in the distance flickering on and off, forever moving, receding. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
435:A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view. ~ Leon Festinger,
436:Worldly success was a potent force in the growth of Islam, and in the shriveling of Christianity. That fact may be troubling to Christians, whose faith so often extols the triumph of the meek and humble while rejecting worldly success, and who are so familiar with the concept of defeat as the root of long-term victory. In practice, though, Christians often had used material successes as proofs of their faith. As we have seen, church writers pointed to miracles and healings to vouch for the power of Christ, and such events often explained important conversions. Though such claims continued to be made, they were increasingly outweighed by the obvious successes of Muslim states and armies. At several critical moments, Muslim victories proved enormously damaging to the Christian cause, from the early triumphs over the Byzantine Empire onward. As the early Islamic convert 'Ali Tabari explained, “[Muhammad’s] victory over the nations is also by necessity and by undeniable arguments a manifest sign of the prophetic office.”20 If God had not been on his side, how could Muhammad’s followers possibly have won such stunning victories over ancient empires? ~ Philip Jenkins,
437:To this day, I remain awestruck by the fact that human beings are capable of this type of metamorphosis. We don’t have to stay stuck displaying the same personality traits over the course of our lifetime but are free to transform into higher expressions of ourselves. Today I can honestly say that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that human beings are capable of making radical and lasting change. After a decade of coaching individuals and leading groups, I have discovered that if I don’t buy into people’s perceptions of who they are and what they are capable of, I can bypass their public personas and see who they are in their highest expression. With a little effort, I can see their magnificence and their potential no matter what they look like or what condition their emotional, spiritual, or financial world is in. I can see through their acts, their personas, their fears and insecurities. I can see who they are apart from the baggage they carry around. The undeniable fact is that underneath all of our public personas, we already are that which we desire to be. Our only job is to see past our own limitations so that we can return to that which we already are. ~ Debbie Ford,
438:We hold these truths to be self-evident.

{Franklin's edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson's original wording, 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable' in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In what became known as 'Hume's Fork' the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.} ~ Benjamin Franklin,
439:CONFUSION 6: WHO TO CALL A CUSTOMER At this stage, it’s important to ask some questions: Which types of Customers would you most like to do business with? Where do you see your real market opportunities? Who would you like to work with, provide service for, and position your business for? A Tactile Customer for whom people is most important? A Neutral Customer for whom the mechanics of how you do business is most important? An Experimental Customer for whom cutting-edge innovation is important? A Traditional Customer for whom low cost and certainty of delivery are absolutely essential? In short, it’s all up to you. No mystery. No magic. Just a systematic process for shaping your business’s future. But you must have the passion to pursue the process. And you must be absolutely clear about every aspect of it. Until you know your Customers as well as you know yourself. Until all your complaints about Customers are a thing of the past. Until you accept the undeniable fact that Customer Acquisition and Customer Satisfaction are more science than art. But unless you’re willing to grow your business, you better not follow any of the above recommendations. Because it will definitely grow. ~ Michael E Gerber,
440:Nothing about Vader seemed natural—not his towering height, his deep voice, his antiquated diction—yet despite those qualities and the mask and respirator, Tarkin believed him to be more man than machine. Although he had clearly twisted the powers of the Force to his own dark purposes, Vader’s innate strength was undeniable. His contained rage was genuine, as well, and not simply the result of some murderous cyberprogram. But the quality that made him most human was the fierce dedication he demonstrated to the Emperor. It was that genuflecting obedience, the steadfast devotion to execute whatever task the Emperor assigned, that had given rise to so many rumors about Vader: that he was a counterpart to the Confederacy’s General Grievous the Emperor had been holding in reserve; that he was an augmented human or near-human who had been trained or had trained himself in the ancient dark arts of the Sith; that he was nothing more than a monster fashioned in some clandestine laboratory. Many believed that the Emperor’s willingness to grant so much authority to such a being heralded the shape of things to come, for it was beyond dispute that Vader was the Empire’s first terror weapon. ~ John Jackson Miller,
441:One of the findings of Barbara Sarnecka’s study on risk assessment and moral judgment, the study in which people were asked to evaluate the danger children were in when left alone under different circumstances—and the moral “wrongness” of the parent who had left them—was that when participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, the level of risk to his child was equal to the risk when he left the child because of circumstances beyond his control (when he was struck unconscious by a car). When a woman was running into work, the moral judgment was closer to the level expressed at her going shopping or having an affair. I’ll admit it—I love this finding. I relish the way it makes plain and undeniable something we all sort of know but aren’t supposed to say: We might accept that mothers occasionally want to do other things besides mothering, that they might want to have a career, a social life, a full human existence. But we don’t like it. We hate it, in fact. A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children. ~ Kim Brooks,
442:Who knew?’ he says. ‘I had no idea that someone could be such a thorn in your foot during a death march and still be irresistibly attractive in some magical, undeniable way.’

‘So is that what people call sweet nothings? Because somehow, I expected it to be a little more . . . complimentary.’

‘Don’t you know a heartfelt declaration of love when you hear one?’

I blink dumbly at him with my heart pounding.

He caresses a lock of my hair out of my face. ‘Look, I know that we’re from different worlds and different people. But I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter.’

‘You don’t care about the angelic rules anymore?’

‘My Watchers have helped me realize that angelic rules are for angels. Without our wings, we can never be fully accepted back into the fold. There will always be talk of taking a newly Fallen’s wings and transplanting them onto us. Angels are perfect. Even with transplanted wings, we’ll never again be perfect. You accept me just the way I am, regardless of whether or not I even have wings. Even when I had my demon wings, you’ve never looked at me with pity. You’ve never wavered in your loyalty. That’s who you are – my brave, loyal, lovable Daughter of Man. ~ Susan Ee,
443:A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs. ~ Ian McEwan,
444:A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs. ~ Ian McEwan,
445:He could no longer deny that for the rest of his life, he would measure every other woman against her, and find them all lacking. Her smile, her sharp tongue, her temper, her infectious laugh, her body and spirit, everything about her struck a pleasurable chord in him. She was independent, willful, stubborn… qualities that most men did not desire in a wife. The fact that he did was as undeniable as it was unexpected.
There were only two ways to manage the situation. He could either continue trying to avoid her, which had been a spectacular failure so far, or he could simply give in. Give in… knowing that she would never be the placid, proper wife he had always envisioned having. In marrying her, he would defy a fate that had been scripted for him before he had even been born.
He would never be entirely certain what to expect from Lillian. She would behave in ways that he would not always understand, and she would bite back like a half-tamed creature whenever he tried to control her. She was a creature possessed of strong emotions and an even stronger will. They would quarrel. She would never allow him to become too comfortable, too settled.
Dear God, was that truly the future he wanted?
Yes. Yes. Yes.

-Marcus' thoughts ~ Lisa Kleypas,
446:The early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists that he inspired are often thought to have their roots in the philosophical investigations of René Descartes.9 Descartes’s famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” has often been cited as emblematic of Western rationalism. This view interprets Descartes to mean “I think, that is, I can manipulate logic and symbols, therefore I am worthwhile.” But in my view, Descartes was not intending to extol the virtues of rational thought. He was troubled by what has become known as the mind-body problem, the paradox of how mind can arise from nonmind, how thoughts and feelings can arise from the ordinary matter of the brain. Pushing rational skepticism to its limits, his statement really means “I think, that is, there is an undeniable mental phenomenon, some awareness, occurring, therefore all we know for sure is that something—let’s call it I—exists.” Viewed in this way, there is less of a gap than is commonly thought between Descartes and Buddhist notions of consciousness as the primary reality. Before 2030, we will have machines proclaiming. Descartes’s dictum. And it won’t seem like a programmed response. The machines will be earnest and convincing. Should we believe them when they claim to be conscious entities with their own volition? ~ Ray Kurzweil,
447:I’ve asked many people these questions and their answers are invariable. “Of course it would.” The cultural correlation is undeniable: we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the higher the IQ, the more likely one is to succeed in life. Hence, we assume that the scientists that win Nobel Prizes, the businesspeople that go from rags to millions, the authors that write runaway bestsellers, register in the highest ranges of IQ simply because they’re enjoying sweet successes. Well, a tremendous amount of research has been done into the scientific correlation between IQ and real-life success, and a very different picture has emerged. IQ and success are related...to a point. Sure, someone with an IQ of 150 (a “genius” by all normal standards) is going to do much better in life than someone with an IQ of 80 (nearly “mentally disabled”). Similarly, a person with an IQ of 130 (“near genius”) has a significant upper hand in life when compared to a person with an IQ of 100 (“average”). But here’s the catch: the relation between IQ and success follows the law of diminishing returns. That is, when you compare two people of relatively high IQs, you can no longer predict success by IQ alone. A scientist with an IQ of 130 is just as likely to rise to the top of his discipline as one with an IQ of 180. Dr. Liam Hudson, a British psychologist that headed up Cambridge’s ~ Sean Patrick,
448:In my lifelong study of the scores of species of ants to be found in the tropical forests of Dal Hon, I am led to the conviction that all forms of life are engaged in a struggle to survive, and that within each species there exists a range of natural but variable proclivities, of physical condition and of behaviour, which in turn weighs for or against in the battle to survive and procreate. Further, it is my suspicion that in the act of procreation, such traits are passed on. By extension, one can see that ill traits reduce the likelihood of both survival and procreation. On the basis of these notions, I wish to propose to my fellow scholars at this noble gathering a law of survival that pertains to all forms of life. But before I do so, I must add one more caveat, drawn from the undeniable behavioural characteristics of, in my instance of speciality, ants. To whit, success of one form of life more often than not initiates devastating population collapse among competitors, and indeed, sometimes outright extinction. And that such annihilation of rivals may in fact be a defining feature of success.
Thus, my colleagues, I wish to propose a mode of operation among all forms of life, which I humbly call-in my four-volume treatise-‘The Betrayal of the Fittest’.

Obsessional Scrolls
Sixth Day Proceedings
Address Of Skavat Gill
Unta, Malazan Empire, 1097 Burn's Sleep ~ Steven Erikson,
449:Wishing to let David sleep, she eased one arm free. “Good morning, wife.” His sleep-graveled voice tickled her ear. Megan smiled and lifted her head to enjoy being near him. They’d slept side by side on the train too, in a smaller bed. But they’d never snuggled up like this. “Good morning, David. I’ve lazed the morning away, it seems. Time to be up and about.” He seemed to focus on her smile with undue interest. Then slowly, smoothly, he lowered his head and kissed her. Her first kiss. It was warm and gentle and she found a surprising pleasure in it. How could a kiss be felt all through a woman’s body? It made no sense, yet at the same time it was undeniable. David raised himself up on his left arm—the one wrapped behind her neck. Without loosening his grip, he was over her, the kiss deeper, his head slanted as if he wanted to be closer, which didn’t seem possible. Just as David shifted his weight to press down on her more fully, the bedroom door flew open. “Pa, it’s morning! Get up! We’re hungry, Ma!” David moved away from her fast, but his arm was wrapped around her and he dragged her on top of him. Their eyes met. She saw dismay dawning in his gaze. She wasn’t sure why he was dismayed, but she found herself annoyed at it. Hadn’t he enjoyed their kiss? Before she could ask what he was thinking, the boys pounced, Zack on top of Megan’s back. Ben on his knees, bouncing on the bed beside them. ~ Mary Connealy,
450:Don’t let negative expectations limit your life

A young man told me: “I don’t want to expect too much. That way if it doesn’t happen I won’t go to bed all disappointed.”
That’s no way to live. If you’re not expecting increase, promotion, or good breaks, you’re not releasing your faith. Faith is what causes God to act. If you expect a break and it doesn’t happen, don’t go to bed disappointed. Go to bed knowing you’re one day closer to seeing it come to pass. Get up the next morning and do it again.
Winners develop this third undeniable quality of expecting good things. You can’t be in neutral and hope to reach your full potential or have God’s best. It’s not enough to not expect anything bad; you have to aggressively expect good things. Are you expecting your dreams to come to pass? Do you expect this year will be better than last year? Are you expecting to live a long, healthy, blessed life? Pay attention to what you’re expecting. Maybe you have a desire to get married. Don’t go around thinking: “I’ll never meet anyone. It’s been so long, and I’m getting too old.” Instead, expect to be at the right place at the right time.
Believe that divine connections will come across your path. Believe that the right person will be attracted to you.
“What if I do that and nothing happens?”
What if you do it and something does happen? I can tell you nothing will happen if you don’t believe. ~ Joel Osteen,
451:LLANEZA
A Hayde Lange
Se abre la verja del jardn
con la docilidad de la pgina
que una frecuente devocin interroga
y adentro las miradas
no precisan fijarse en los objetos
que ya estn cabalmente en la memoria.
Conozco las costumbres y las almas
y ese dialecto de alusiones
que toda agrupacin humana va urdiendo.
No necesito hablar
ni mentir privilegios;
bien me conocen quienes aqu me rodean,
bien saben mis congojas y mi flaqueza.
Eso es alcanzar lo ms alto,
lo que tal vez nos dar el Cielo:
no admiraciones ni victorias
sino sencillamente ser admitidos
como parte de una Realidad innegable,
como las piedras y los rboles.

PLAINNESS
To Hayde Lange
The gardens grillwork gate
opens with the ease of a page
in a much-thumbed book,
and, once inside, our eyes
have no need to dwell on objects
already fixed and exact in memory.
Here habits and minds and the private language
all families invent
are everyday things to me.
What necessity is there to speak
or pretend to be someone else?
The whole house knows me,
theyre aware of my worries and weakness.
This is the best that can happen
what Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not to be wondered at or required to succeed
but simply to be let in
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones of the road, like trees.
[Norman Thomas di Giovanni]
~ Jorge Luis Borges, Plainness
,
452:The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.

Religious fundamentalists also develop an exagerrated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feurerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feurerback, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new Atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche , Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work. ~ Karen Armstrong,
453:The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond. ~ Mark Strand,
454:You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where space-time has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity. ~ Italo Calvino,
455:No1 stared into his captor’s eyes. ‘I said, I want to talk to Qweffor.’ Abbot heard him that time, because the voice wasn’t No1’s. It was a voice of pure magic, layered with undeniable power. Abbot blinked. ‘I’ll… eh… see if he’s in.’ It was too late for compliance: No1 wasn’t about to rein in his power now. He sent a magical probe into Abbot’s brain via the horns. The horns glowed bright blue and then began shedding large brittle flakes. ‘Careful with the horns,’ said Abbot blearily, then his eyes rolled back in his head. ‘The ladies love the horns.’ No1 rooted round in Abbot’s head for a while until he found Qweffor sleeping in a dark corner, in a place scientists would call the limbic system. The problem, realized No1, is that there is only room in every head for one consciousness. Abbot needs to go somewhere else. And so, with this instinctive knowledge and absolutely no expertise, No1 fed Qweffor’s consciousness until it expanded, occupying the entire brain. It was not a perfect fit, and poor Qweffor would suffer from twitches and sudden loss of bowel control at public functions, a syndrome which would become known as Abbot’s Revenge. But at least he was in control of a body, most of the time. After several years and three hearings, fairy warlocks would manage to rehouse Abbot’s consciousness in a lower life form. A guinea pig, to be precise. The guinea pig’s own consciousness was soon subjugated by Abbot’s. Warlock interns would often amuse themselves by throwing tiny swords into the pig’s pen, and crack up watching the little piggy trying to pick them up. ~ Eoin Colfer,
456:Do you have to replace the front door every day?”
Smiling at him, not a big smile, but a smile nonetheless. It warmed Jack from the inside out.
“What are you talking about? I told you, you’re safe here.”
“Are you safe here?”
“What?”
He didn’t understand what she meant, but he liked her sweet smile.
“Women. They must beat down that door every day to get to you.”
He cracked up with laughter.
“You think so, huh.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I think you’re pretty damn beautiful yourself.”
“Yeah, right. I hear bandages and bruises are in this year.”
“You’re beautiful.”
They stared at each other, that invisible but undeniable something passing between them.
He wanted to touch her, but knew now wasn’t the time. As forward as she’d been joking with him about women beating down his door, she shied away from acknowledging this thing between them.
He broke off the look first and dug out his supplies. He wrapped a bandage around her thigh, trying not to think about the softness of her skin or the fact she was naked under the sheet.
Her eyes fluttered shut. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead. She placed her hand on his cheek.
Such a simple gesture. He leaned into her palm, felt her fingers brush against his skin.
How long has it been since a simple touch affected him so deeply?
Reluctant to leave her, nonetheless he drew back and her eyes remained closed. He took her hand from his cheek and placed it on the pillow next to her head.
He nuzzled at her ear and whispered, “Beautiful. Believe it.”

-Jenna & Jack ~ Jennifer Ryan,
457:I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know him. It has no decency, respects no law of convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ~ Yann Martel,
458:I suspect that self-deception is similar to its cousins, overconfidence and optimism, and as with these other biases, it has both benefits and disadvantages. On the positive side, an unjustifiably elevated belief in ourselves can increase our general well-being by helping us cope with stress; it can increase our persistence while doing difficult or tedious tasks; and it can get us to try new and different experiences. We persist in deceiving ourselves in part to maintain a positive self-image. We gloss over our failures, highlight our successes (even when they’re not entirely our own), and love to blame other people and outside circumstances when our failures are undeniable. Like our friend the crab, we can use self-deception to boost our confidence when we might not otherwise feel bold. Positioning ourselves on the basis of our finer points can help us snag a date, finish a big project, or land a job. (I am not suggesting that you puff up your résumé, of course, but a little extra confidence can often work in our favor.) On the negative side, to the extent that an overly optimistic view of ourselves can form the basis of our actions, we may wrongly assume that things will turn out for the best and as a consequence not actively make the best decisions. Self-deception can also cause us to “enhance” our life stories with, say, a degree from a prestigious university, which can lead us to suffer a great deal when the truth is ultimately revealed. And, of course, there is the general cost of deception. When we and those around us are dishonest, we start suspecting everyone, and without trust our lives become more difficult in almost every way. ~ Dan Ariely,
459:Anthropic Principle implies that when we look at the world around us, it would seem, at least at first blush, that the universe was somehow designed to support and nourish human life. This concept, which is very prevalent in the world of secular science and philosophy, didn’t originate with Christian scholars. But the evidence points so overwhelmingly toward this apparent design in the universe that it’s virtually undeniable by experts of every religious and nonreligious stripe. This has sent skeptics scurrying to find some sort of natural explanation for this apparently supernatural phenomenon. Here are a few of the hard facts:         Raise or lower the universe’s rate of expansion by even one part in a million, and it would have ruled out the possibility of life.       If the average distance between stars were any greater, planets like earth would not have been formed; any smaller, the planetary orbits necessary for life would not have occurred.       If the ratio of carbon to oxygen had been slightly different than it is, none of us would have been here to breathe the air.       Change the tilt of the earth’s axis slightly in one direction, and we would freeze. Change it the other direction, and we’d burn up.       Suppose the earth had been a bit closer or further from the sun, or just a little larger or smaller, or if it rotated at a speed any different from the one we’re spinning at right now. Given any of these changes, the resulting temperature variations would be completely fatal.   So the lesson we can draw from the Anthropic Principle is this: someone must have gone to a lot of effort to make things just right so that you and I could be here to enjoy life. In short, modern science points to the fact that we must really matter to God! Being the ever-obedient ~ Bill Hybels,
460:Every day we get to choose our attitudes. We can determine to be happy and look on the bright side--expecting good things, and believing we will accomplish our dreams--or we can elect to be negative by focusing on our problems, dwelling on what didn’t work out, and living worried and discouraged.
These are the choices we all can make. Nobody can force you to have a certain attitude. Life will go so much better if you simply decide to be positive. When you wake up, choose to be happy. That is the fourth undeniable quality of a winner.
Choose to be grateful for the day. Choose to look on the bright side. Choose to focus on the possibilities.
A good attitude does not automatically come. If you don’t choose it, then more than likely you’ll default to a negative mind-set, thinking: “I don’t feel like going to work. I’ve got so many obstacles. Nothing good is in my future.”
A negative attitude will limit your life.
We all face difficulties. We all have tough times, but the right attitude is, “This is not permanent, it’s only temporary. In the meantime I’m going to enjoy my life.”
Maybe you didn’t get the promotion you worked hard for, or you didn’t qualify for that house you wanted. You could easily live with a sour attitude. Instead, you should think: “That’s all right. I know something better is coming.”
If you become caught in traffic, think positively: “I’m not going to be stressed. I know I’m at the right place at the right time.”
If your medical report wasn’t good, you can choose to think: “I’m not worried. This too shall pass.”
If your dream is taking longer than you thought, you can choose to think: “I’m not discouraged. I know the right people, and the right opportunities are already in my future, and at the right time it will come to pass. ~ Joel Osteen,
461:However, in those last months of riding across the golden landscape of California she felt she was flying free, like a condor. She was awakened one morning by the whinnying of her horse with the full light of dawn in her face, surrounded by tall sequoias that, like centenary guards, had watched over her sleep, by gentle hills, and, far in the distance, purple mountaintops; at that moment she was filled with an atavistic happiness that was entirely new. She realized that she had lost the feeling of panic that had lain curled in the pit of her stomach like a rat, threatening to gnaw her entrails. Her fears had dissipated in the awesome grandeur of this landscape. To the measure that she confronted danger, she was becoming bolder: she had lost her fear of fear. "I am finding new strength in myself; I may always have had it and just didn't know because I'd never had to call on it. I don't know at what turn in the road I shed the person I used to be, Tao. Now I am only one of thousands of adventurers scattered along the banks of these crystal-clear rivers and among the foothills of these eternal mountains. Here men are proud, with no one above them but the sky overhead; they bow to no one because they are inventing equality. And I want to be one of them. Some are winners with sacks of gold slung over their backs; some, defeated, carry nothing but disillusion and debts, but they all believe they are masters of their destiny, of the ground they walk on, of the future, of their own undeniable dignity. After knowing them I can never again be the lady Miss Rose intended me to be. Finally I understand Joaquín, why he stole precious hours from our love to talk to me about freedom. So, this was what he meant . . . It was this euphoria, this light, this happiness as intense as the few moments of shared love I can remember. ~ Isabel Allende,
462:Abruptly, the sea of people parted . . . and then there they were. Bella, with Nalla in her arms, Z standing beside his girls.
Beth broke down all over again as the female came forward.
God, it was impossible not to remember how Nalla had started this, putting into motion the need that had become undeniable.
Bella was tearing up, too, as she stopped. “We just want to say yay!”
At that moment, Nalla reached out to Beth, a gummy smile on her face, pure joy radiating out.
No turning that down, nope, not at all.
Beth took the little girl out of her mother’s arms and positioned her on her chest, capturing one of the pinwheeling hands and giving kisses, kisses, kisses. “You ready to be a big . . .” Beth glanced at Z and then her husband. “. . . a big sister?”
Yes, Beth thought. Because that’s what the Brotherhood and their families were. Close as siblings, tighter than blood because they were chosen.
“Yes, she is,” Bella said as she wiped under her eyes and looked back at Z. “She is so ready.”
“My brother.” Z shoved out his palm, his scarred face in a half smile, his yellow eyes warm. “Congratulations.”
Instead of shaking anything, Wrath shoved that ultrasound picture into his Brother’s face. “Do you see him? See my son? He’s big, right, Beth?”
She kissed Nalla’s supersoft hair. “Yes.”
“Big and healthy, right?”
Beth laughed some more. “Big and healthy. Absolutely perfect.”
“Perfect!” Wrath bellowed. “And this is a doctor saying it—I mean, she went to medical school.”
Even Z started laughing at that point.
Beth gave Nalla back to her parents. “And Dr. Sam told me she’s delivered over fifteen thousand babies over the course of her career—”
“See!” Wrath yelled. “She knows these things. My son is perfect! Where’s the champagne? Fritz! Get the fucking champagne! ~ J R Ward,
463:They landed in a field with a light dusting of snow.
“Middle of nowhere?” Elysia said, looking around. “Interesting choice.”
“No waaaay!” Thrilled, Ferbus broke from the group and started running toward a series of objects on the horizon.
Driggs snickered. “This should be fun.”
As they got closer to Ferbus’s shouts of glee, the forms that had made no sense at a distance began to take shape into something that made even less sense: stacks of old automobiles, seemingly dropped from space but arranged in an undeniable pattern.
“Carhenge!” Ferbus jubilantly danced through the pillars, taking it all in. “Man, you hear about it, you dream about the day you might get to see it, but it’s even better than I imagined!”
Elysia blinked. “What is Carhenge?”
“Don’t you get it?” said Ferbus, the grin still on his face. “It’s like Stonehenge.” He pointed. “But with cars.”
The Juniors stared at him. Bang coughed.
“Well,” said Uncle Mort after a moment, “as riveting as”—he consulted his atlas—“rural Nebraska is, it’s probably best that we keep moving.”
Ferbus’s face fell. “But the gift shop.”
Uncle Mort rubbed his temples. “Tell you what, next time we’re being chased by a murderous criminal, I’ll try to schedule in a little more time for sightseeing.” He formed the Juniors back into a circle. “Let’s not assign a designated driver this time. We’ll scythe, and whoever thinks of something first, somewhere farther east—that’s where we’ll go. Ready?”
***
This time around they were greeted by the stoic faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, all wearing caps of snow. “Ooh, Mount Rushmore,” Ferbus said bitterly. “Because dead presidents are so much more fascinating than the subtle, delicate art of automotive sculpture.”
“East!” Uncle Mort said, exasperated. “Not north! ~ Gina Damico,
464:Too many people suffer from destination disease. They reach a certain level, earn their degrees, buy their dream homes, and then just coast.
Studies show 50 percent of high school graduates never read another entire book. One reason may be that they see learning as something you do in school, just something you do for a period of life instead of as a way of life.
We all learned when we were in school. Our teachers, coaches, and parents taught us. We were expected to learn when we were school age. But some tend to think that once they finish a certain level of education: “I’m done with school. I’ve finished my training. I’ve got a good job.”
Winners never stop learning, and this is the sixth undeniable quality I have observed. God did not create us to reach one level and then stop. Whether you’re nine or ninety years old, you should constantly be learning, improving your skills, and getting better at what you do.
You have to take responsibility for your own growth. Growth is not automatic. What steps are you taking to improve? Are you reading books or listening to educational videos or audios? Are you taking any courses on the Internet or going to seminars? Do you have mentors? Are you gleaning information from people who know more than you?
Winners don’t coast through life relying on what they have already learned. You have treasure on the inside--gifts, talents, and potential--put in you by the Creator of the universe. But those gifts will not automatically come out. They must be developed.
I read that the wealthiest places on earth are not the oil fields of the Middle East or the diamond mines of South Africa. The wealthiest places are the cemeteries. Buried in the ground are businesses that were never formed, books that were never written, songs that were never sung, dreams that never came to life, potential that was never released. ~ Joel Osteen,
465:Orpheus literally had his hands full, holding on to her while she struggled to break away from him and plunge into the water, time after time. How the other Argonauts laughed!
Jason was exasperated. He needed Orpheus to keep the rowers working together and he was short by three men since the battle. He couldn’t spare anyone else from the crew to keep the girl from killing herself. When he ordered Herakles to grab her and tie her to the mast, our “dove” showed us that she spoke our language well enough to spew blistering curses and threats.
“Listen to that!” Herakles exclaimed with an exaggerated shudder. “She’s a witch’s daughter, sure enough. She’ll put a spell on me if I offend her.”
“Stop that nonsense and control the brat,” Jason snapped.
“Alas, beloved prince, I can’t.” Herakles sighed and hung his head with such a pathetic air that Milo, Hylas, and I stuffed our knuckles into our mouths to stifle snickers. “I made a vow to Hera not to touch a woman until we come to Colchis.”
That was too much for Hylas. He burst into hoots of laughter, and Milo and I joined in, until we had to clutch one another to keep from falling over.
I was still trying to catch my breath when Jason’s foot shot out and dealt me an undeniable kick in the behind. “You think this is funny? You watch her!” he barked at me. “If anything happens to the scrawny little bitch, we’ll stick you in a dress, hand you over to her flea-bitten relatives, and be halfway to Colchis before they figure out they’ve been duped. If you’re lucky, they’ll kill you quickly. If not, they might decide to use their knives to turn you into the daughter they lost. See if you can laugh your way out of that, boy!” He showed his teeth in a satisfied smirk and didn’t understand why I kept on laughing at his threat, even while I walked off to assume my new job as the girl’s keeper. ~ Esther M Friesner,
466:Yes, but … the waking and the sleeping, the sludge of e-mails and appointments, the low-temperature life that is, for the most part, life: even if there are moments of intensity that seem to release us from this, surely any spiritual maturity demands an acknowledgment that there is not going to be some miraculous, transfiguring intrusion into reality. The sky will not darken and the dead will not speak; no voice from heaven is going to boom you back to a pre-reflective faith, nor will you feel, unless in death, a purifying fire that scalds all of consciousness like fog from the raw face of God. Is faith, then - assuming it isn’t merely a form of resignation or denial - some sort of reconciliation with the implacable fact of matter, or is it a deep, ultimate resistance to it? Both. Neither. To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you - not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. Heading home from work, irritated by my busyness and the sense of wasted days, shouldering through the strangers who merge and flow together on Michigan Avenue, merge and flow in the mirrored facades, I flash past the rapt and undecided face of my grandmother, lit and lost at once. In a board meeting, bored to oblivion, I hear a pen scrape like a fingernail on a cell wall, watch the glasses sweat as if even water wanted out, when suddenly, at the center of the long table, light makes of a bell-shaped pitcher a bell that rings in no place on this earth. Moments, only, and I am aware even within them, and thus am outside of them, yet something in the very act of such attention has troubled the tyranny of the ordinary, as if the world at which I gazed, gazed at me, as if the lost face and the living crowd, the soundless bell and the mind in which it rings, all hankered toward - expressed some undeniable hope for - one end. ~ Christian Wiman,
467:Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems
that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense
power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing
education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human
civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally
random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress
and misery depression starvation and degradation are
inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage
of the population. The periods of economic stability also
ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom
and among the industrial Western democracies today despite
occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent
corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of
legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business
oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration
of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the
increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources
the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations
the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are
far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms
it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus
the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes
in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while
we may not admire always the personal motives of our business
leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the
good life as it comes down through our native American soil.
You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take
pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety
without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of
American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying
in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the
turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries
and no one will hurt you. ~ E L Doctorow,
468:Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century; the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant anarchy of the explosion, while later decades lost themselves in the faceless regimen of the grid. You can see the last ten years or so as a return to those Victorian webs, though I suspect the image that has been burned into our retinas over the past decade is more prosaic: windows piled atop one another on a screen, or perhaps a mouse clicking on an icon. These shapes are shorthand for a moment in time, a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought: Charles Darwin and George Eliot used the web as a way of understanding biological evolution and social struggles; a half century later, the futurists embraced the explosions of machine-gun fire, while Picasso used them to re-create the horrors of war in Guernica. The shapes are a way of interpreting the world, and while no shape completely represents its epoch, they are an undeniable component of the history of thinking. When I imagine the shape that will hover above the first half of the twenty-first century, what comes to mind is not the coiled embrace of the genome, or the etched latticework of the silicon chip. It is instead the pulsing red and green pixels of Mitch Resnick’s slime mold simulation, moving erratically across the screen at first, then slowly coalescing into larger forms. The shape of those clusters—with their lifelike irregularity, and their absent pacemakers—is the shape that will define the coming decades. I see them on the screen, growing and dividing, and I think: That way lies the future. ~ Steven Johnson,
469:Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction author, describes the Singularity as “the Rapture for nerds” and in the same way Christians are divided into preterist, premillennialist, and postmillennialist camps regarding the timing of the Parousia,39 Apocalyptic Techno-Heretics can be divided into three sects, renunciationist, apotheosan, and posthumanist. Whereas renunciationists foresee a dark future wherein humanity is enslaved or even eliminated by its machine masters and await the Singularity with the same sort of resignation that Christians who don’t buy into Rapture doctrine anticipate the Tribulation and the Antichrist, apotheosans anticipate a happy and peaceful amalgamation into a glorious, godlike hive mind of the sort envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation novels. Posthumanists, meanwhile, envision a detente between Man and Machine, wherein artificial intelligence will be wedded to intelligence amplification and other forms of technobiological modification to transform humanity and allow it to survive and perhaps even thrive in the Posthuman Era .40 Although it is rooted entirely in science and technology,41 there are some undeniable religious parallels between the more optimistic visions of the Singularity and conventional religious faith. Not only is there a strong orthogenetic element inherent in the concept itself, but the transhuman dream of achieving immortality through uploading one’s consciousness into machine storage and interacting with the world through electronic avatars sounds suspiciously like shedding one’s physical body in order to walk the streets of gold with a halo and a harp. Furthermore, the predictions of when this watershed event is expected to occur rather remind one of Sir Isaac Newton’s tireless attempts to determine the precise date of the Eschaton, which he finally concluded would take place sometime after 2065, only thirty years after Kurzweil expects the Singularity. So, if they’re both correct, at least Mankind can console itself that the Machine Age will be a short one. ~ Vox Day,
470:Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned. ~ Graham Moore,
471:I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear. Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you. The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ~ Yann Martel,
472:I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, show no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dear like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, your open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ~ Yann Martel,
473:I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ~ Yann Martel,
474:What tempts you, Pippa?"
"I-" She hesitated. "I care a great deal for meringue."
He laughed, the sound bigger and bolder than she expected.
"It's true."
"No doubt you do. But you may have meringue anytime you like." He stood back and indicated that she should enter the carriage.
She ignored the silent command, eager to make her point. "Not so. If the cook has not made it, I cannot eat it."
A smile played on his lips. "Ever-practical Pippa. If you want it, you can find it. That's my point. Surely, somewhere in London, someone will take pity upon you and satisfy your craving for meringue."
Her brow furrowed. "Therefore, I am not tempted by it?"
"No. You desire it. But that's not the same thing. Desire is easy. It's as simple as you wish to have meringue, and meringue is procured." He waved a hand toward the interior of the carriage but did not offer to help her up. "In."
She ascended another step before turning back. The additional height brought them eye to eye. "I don't understand. What is temptation, then?"
"Temptation..." He hesitated, and she found herself leaning forward, eager for this curious, unsettling lesson. "Temptation turns you. It makes you into something you never dreamed, it presses you to give up everything you ever loved, it calls you to sell your soul for one, fleeting moment."
The words were low and dark and full of truth, and they hovered in the silence for a long moment, an undeniable invitation. He was close, protecting her from toppling off the block, the heat of him wrapping around her despite the cold. "It makes you ache," he whispered, and she watched the curve of his lips in the darkness. "You'll make any promise, swear any oath. For one... perfect... unsoiled taste."
Oh, my.
Pippa exhaled, long and reedy, nerves screaming, thoughts muddled. She closed her eyes, swallowed, forced herself back, away from him and the way he... tempted her.
Why was he so calm and cool and utterly in control?
Why was he not riddled with similar... feelings?
He was a very frustrating man.
She sighed. "That must be a tremendous meringue."
A beat followed the silly, stupid words... words she wished she could take back. How ridiculous. And then he chuckled, teeth flashing in the darkness. "Indeed," he said, the words thicker and more gravelly than before. ~ Sarah MacLean,
475:Studies show that enthusiastic people get better breaks. They’re promoted more often, have higher incomes, and live happier lives. That’s not a coincidence. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek word entheos. Theos is a term for “God.”
When you’re enthusiastic, you are full of God. When you get up in the morning excited about life, recognizing that each day is a gift, you are motivated to pursue your goals. You will have a favor and blessing that will cause you to succeed.
The eight undeniable quality of a winner is that they stay passionate throughout their lives. Too many people have lost their enthusiasm. At one time they were excited about their futures and passionate about their dreams, but along the way they hit some setbacks. They didn’t get the promotions they wanted, maybe a relationship didn’t work out, or they had health issues. Something took the wind out of their sails. They’re just going through the motions of life; getting up, going to work, and coming home.
God didn’t breathe His life into us so we would drag through the day. He didn’t create us in His image, crown us with His favor, and equip us with His power so that we would have no enthusiasm.
You may have had some setbacks. The wind may have been taken out of your sails, but this is a new day. God is breathing new life into you. If you shake off the blahs and get your passion back, then the winds will start blowing once again--not against you, but for you. When you get in agreement with God, He will cause things to shift in your favor.
On January 15, 2009, Capt. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed a jet airplane in the Hudson River after the plane’s engines were disabled by multiple bird strikes. Despite the dangers of a massive passenger plane landing in icy waters, all 155 passengers and crew members survived. It’s known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
Just after the successful emergency landing and rescue, a reporter asked a middle-aged male passenger what he thought about surviving that frightening event. Although he was shaken up, cold and wet, the passenger had a glow on his face, and excitement in his voice when he replied: “I was alive before, but now I’m really alive.”
After facing a life-and-death situation, the survivor found that his perspective had changed. He recognized each moment as a gift and decided that instead of just living, he would start really living. ~ Joel Osteen,
476:CONFUSION 5: HOW TO DEAL WITH CUSTOMER DISSATISFACTION If you have hit each step to this point, customer dissatisfaction will be rare. But dissatisfactions will happen. Here’s what to do about them: 1. Always listen to what your Customers are saying. And never interrupt while they’re saying it! 2. After you’re sure you’ve heard all of your Customer’s complaint, make absolutely certain you understand what he or she said. You could ask, “Can I repeat what you’ve just told me, Mrs. Jones, to make absolutely certain I understand you?” 3. Secure your Customer’s acknowledgment that you have heard his or her complaint accurately. 4. Apologize for whatever your Customer thinks you did that dissatisfied him or her even if you didn’t do it! 5. After your Customer has acknowledged your apology, ask exactly what would make him or her happy. 6. Repeat what your Customer told you would make him or her happy, and get his or her acknowledgment that you heard it correctly. 7. If at all possible, give your Customer exactly what he or she asked for! But what if your Customer wants something completely unreasonable? If you’ve followed my recommendations to the letter, what your Customer asks will seldom seem unreasonable. That’s assuming you’ve got the right Customer. CONFUSION 6: WHO TO CALL A CUSTOMER At this stage, it’s important to ask some questions: Which types of Customers would you most like to do business with? Where do you see your real market opportunities? Who would you like to work with, provide service for, and position your business for? A Tactile Customer for whom people is most important? A Neutral Customer for whom the mechanics of how you do business is most important? An Experimental Customer for whom cutting-edge innovation is important? A Traditional Customer for whom low cost and certainty of delivery are absolutely essential? In short, it’s all up to you. No mystery. No magic. Just a systematic process for shaping your business’s future. But you must have the passion to pursue the process. And you must be absolutely clear about every aspect of it. Until you know your Customers as well as you know yourself. Until all your complaints about Customers are a thing of the past. Until you accept the undeniable fact that Customer Acquisition and Customer Satisfaction are more science than art. But unless you’re willing to grow your business, you better not follow any of the above recommendations. Because it will definitely grow. ~ Michael E Gerber,
477:In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: the certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half—truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the mission to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power. Such is the story of all civilizations through the ages as they spread over the earth by invading and colonizing. Differences must be suppressed; “savages” must be civilized. We must prove by all possible means that our culture, our power, our knowledge, and our technology are the best, that our gods are the only gods! This is not just the story of civilizations but also of all wars of religion, inquisitions, censorships, dictatorships; all things, in short, that are ideologies. An ideology is a set of ideas translated into a set of values. Because they are held to be absolutely true, these ideas and values need to be imposed on others if they are not readily accepted. A political system, a school of psychology, and a philosophy of economics can all be ideologies. Even a place of work can be an ideology. Religious sub—groups, sects, are based upon ideological principles. Religions themselves can become ideologies. And ideologues, by their nature, are not open to new ideas or even to debate; they refuse to accept or listen to anyone else’s reality. They refuse to admit any possibility of error or even criticism of their system; they are closed up in their set of ideas, theories, and values. We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self—image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God. ~ Jean Vanier,
478:Contemplations on the belly
When pregnant with our first, Dean and I attended a child birth class. There were about 15 other couples, all 6-8 months pregnant, just like us. As an introduction, the teacher asked us to each share what had been our favorite part of pregnancy and least favorite part. I was surprised by how many of the men and women there couldn't name a favorite part. When it was my turn, I said, "My least favorite has been the nausea, and my favorite is the belly."

We were sitting in the back of the room, so it was noticeable when several heads turned to get a look at me. Dean then spoke. "Yeah, my least favorite is that she was sick, and my favorite is the belly too."

Now nearly every head turned to gander incredulously at the freaky couple who actually liked the belly.

Dean and I laughed about it later, but we were sincere. The belly is cool. It is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, an unmistakable sign of what's going on inside, the wigwam for our little squirmer, the mark of my undeniable superpower of baby-making. I loved the belly and its freaky awesomeness, and especially the flutters, kicks, and bumps from within.

Twins belly is a whole new species. I marvel at the amazing uterus within and skin without with their unceasing ability to stretch (Reed Richards would be impressed). I still have great admiration for the belly, but I also fear it. Sometimes I wonder if I should build a shrine to it, light some incense, offer up gifts in an attempt both to honor it and avoid its wrath. It does seem more like a mythic monstrosity you'd be wise not to awaken than a bulbous appendage. It had NEEDS. It has DEMANDS. It will not be taken lightly (believe me, there's nothing light about it). I must give it its own throne, lying sideways atop a cushion, or it will CRUSH MY ORGANS. This belly is its own creature, is subject to different laws of growth and gravity. No, it's not a cute belly, not a benevolent belly. It would have tea with Fin Fang Foom; it would shake hands with Cthulhu. It's no wonder I'm so restless at night, having to sleep with one eye open.

Nevertheless, I honor you, belly, and the work you do to protect and grow my two precious daughters inside. Truly, they must be even more powerful than you to keep you enslaved to their needs. It's quite clear that out of all of us, I'm certainly not the one in control. I am here to do your bidding, belly and babies. I am your humble servant. ~ Shannon Hale,
479:Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the
means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed. Yet, in the same
pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without
any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people. The pamphlet, which
makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and
anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx
and Engels. The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed. As for the means of such
a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the
State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative. Ten pages farther on, without any kind of
transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters "and also to direct
the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the
socialist economy." The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new
mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely. Already we can perceive the contradiction of the Stalinist
regime in conflict with its official philosophy. Either this regime has realized the classless socialist society, and the
maintenance of a formidable apparatus of repression is not justified in Marxist terms, or it has not realized the
classless society and has therefore proved that Marxist doctrine is erroneous and, in particular, that the socialization
of the means of production does not mean the disappearance of classes. Confronted with its official doctrine, the
regime is forced to choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has betrayed it. In fact, together with Nechaiev and
Tkachev, it is Lassalle, the inventor of State socialism, whom Lenin has caused to triumph in Russia, to the
detriment of Marx. From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is
summed up in the struggle between the workers' democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship; in other
words, between justice and expediency. ~ Albert Camus,
480:We often struggle to conceive of and describe the scope and scale of new technologies, meaning that we have trouble even thinking them. What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. A new shorthand is required, one that simultaneously acknowledges and addresses the reality of a world in which people, politics, culture and technology are utterly enmeshed. We have always been connected - unequally, illogically, and some more than others - but entirely and inevitably. What changes in the network is that this connection is visible and undeniable. We are confronted at all times by the radical interconnectedness of things and our selves, and we must reckon with this realization in new ways. It is insufficient to speak of the internet or amorphous technologies, alone and unaccountable, as causing or accelerating the chasm in our understanding and agency. For want of a better term, I use the word 'network' to include us and our technologies in one vast system - to include human and nonhuman agency and understanding, knowing and unknowing, within the same agential soup. The chasm is not between us and our technologies, but within the network itself, and it is through the network that we come to know it.

Finally, systemic literacy permits, performs, and responds to critique. The systems that we will be discussing are too critical to be thought, understood, designed and enacted by the few, especially when those few all too easily align themselves with, or are subsumed by, older elites and power structures. There is a concrete and causal relationship between the complexity of the systems we encounter every day; the opacity with which most of those systems are constructed or described; and fundamental, global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism, All too often, new technologies are presented as inherently emancipatory. But this is itself an example of computational thinking, of which we are all guilty. Those of us who have been early adopters and cheerleaders of new technologies, who have experienced their manifold pleasures and benefitted from their opportunities, and who have consequently argued, often naively, for their wider implementation, are in no less danger from their uncritical deployment. But the argument for critique cannot be made from individual threats, nor from identification with the less fortunate or less knowledgeable. Individualism and empathy are both insufficient in the network. Survival and solidarity must be possible without understanding. ~ James Bridle,
481:We didn't finish that dance."
"Here?"
"Why not?"
Echo's high heel tapped against the sidewalk, the telltale sign of nerves. I took a deliberate step forward and caught her waist before she coud back away from me. My siren had sung to me for way too long, capturing my heart, tempting me with her body, driving me slowly insane. Now, I expected her to pay up.
"Do you hear that?" I aked.
Echo raised an eyebrow when she heard nothing but the sound of water trickling in the fountain. "Hear what?"
I slid my right hand down her arm, cradled her hand against my chest and swayed us from side to side. "The music."
Her eyes danced. "Maybe if you could tell me what i'm supposed to be hearing."
"Slow drum beat." With one finger i tapped the beat into the small of her back. "Acoustic quitar." I leaned down and hummed my favorite song in her ear. Her sweet cinnamon smell intoxicated me.
She relaxed, fitting perfectly into my body. In the crisp, cold February air, we swayed together, moving to our own personal beat. For one moment, we escaped hell. No teachers, no therapist, no well-meaning friends, no nightmares-just the two of us, dancing.
My song ended, my finger stopped tapping the beat, and we ceased swaying from side to side. She held perfectly still, keeping her hand in mine, her head resting on my shoulder. I nuzzled into the warmth of her silky curls, tightening my hold on her. Echo was becoming essential, like air.
I eased my hand to her chin, lifting her face toward me. My thumb caressed her warm, smooth cheek. My heart beat faster.
A ghost of that siren smile graced her lips as she tilted her head closer to mine, creating the undeniable pull of the sailor lost to the sea to the beautiful goddess calling him home.
I kissed her lips. Soft, full, warm-everything i'd fantasized it would be and more, so much more. Echo hesitantly pressed back, a curious question for which i had a response. I parted my lips and teased her bottom one, begging, praying, for permission. Her smooth hands inched up my neck and pulled at my hair, bringing me closer.
She opened her mouth, her tongue seductively touching mine, almost bringing me to my knees. Flames licked through me as our kiss deepened. Her hands massaged my scalp and neck, only stoking the heat of the fire.
Forgetting every rule i'd created for this moment, my hands wandered up her back, twining in her hair, bringing her closer to me. I wanted Echo. I needed Echo.
Her eyes met mine again. "So what does this mean for us?"
I lowered my forehead to hers. "It means you 're mine. ~ Katie McGarry,
482:...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get.

See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On.

The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour.

And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes. ~ Catherynne M Valente,
483:Would the pair of you like to turn your backs so you exclude us more effectively?” Jode asks.

“We’re just adding to the list.” I hold up my journal.

“Daryn.” Gideon shakes his head, pretending to be disappointed. “It’s our list.”

“A list?” Jode leans back, resting his head against his bag. “What’s this list about?”

Rather than explain it, I just lean over and give it to him.

Gideon puts his hand over his heart and winces. “I hate sharing, Martin.”

I lean up, whispering in his ear. “Some things are only for you.”

He gives me a long unblinking look that makes my face burn and my body feel light and hot.

“This is an outrage,” Jode says dryly. “I’m in here once and Gideon is here … two, three, four times?”

“Three,” I say. “The last one doesn’t really count.”

“Oh, it counts,” Gideon says.

“How many times am I in it?” Marcus asks.

“Are you guys making this a competition?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah.”

“Definitely. And I’m dominating.”

“For real,” Marcus says. “How many times am I on there?”

“Once, like me. For your winning smile.” Jode closes the notebook and tosses it to Marcus. “But don’t let it go to your head. Gideon’s arse has a spot on the list as well.”

Gideon looks at me and winks. “Like I said, dominating.”

“Dare, you got a pen?” Marcus asks.

This catches me by surprise for a moment. “Yes.” I toss it to him, smiling. This is perfect. Whatever he adds, it’s already perfect.

As Marcus writes, Jode leans back and gazes up at the trees. “You’re thinking it’ll be five for you after this. Aren’t you, Gideon?”

“You know me well, Ellis.”

Marcus finishes writing. He sets the pen in the fold and hands the journal to Gideon. I lean in and read.

Marcus’s handwriting is elegant cursive—almost astonishingly elegant. And what he wrote is, as expected, perfection. Even better is that Gideon reads it aloud.

“‘Twenty-eight. The family you make.’” He looks at Marcus. “Damn right, bro. This is the best one here.” He looks at me. “Tied with fourteen.”

“Ah, yes,” Jode says. “Gideon’s Super Lips.”

Marcus shakes his head at me. “Why?”

“It was a mistake. I wrote it before the list went public. What’s your addition, Jode? It can be anything. Anything that has significance to you.”

“Full English breakfast,” he says, without missing a beat. “Bacon, eggs, sausages, baked beans, grilled tomato, mushrooms, toast, marmalade. With tea, of course. One of life’s undeniable pleasures.”

My mouth instantly waters. “Well, it’s no trail mix, but all right.” I add “English Breakfast” to the list. ~ Veronica Rossi,
484:No matter how highly placed they were, they were still officials, their views were well established and well known, famous. It could have rained frogs over Tan Son Nhut and they wouldn’t have been upset; Cam Ranh Bay could have dropped into the South China Sea and they would have found some way to make it sound good for you; the Bo Doi Division (Ho’s Own) could have marched by the American embassy and they would have characterized it as “desperate”—what did even the reporters closest to the Mission Council ever find to write about when they’d finished their interviews? (My own interview with General Westmoreland had been hopelessly awkward. He’d noticed that I was accredited to Esquire and asked me if I planned to be doing “humoristical” pieces. Beyond that, very little was really said. I came away feeling as though I’d just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says, “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says, “This is a desk.” I couldn’t think of anything to ask him, and the interview didn’t happen.) I honestly wanted to know what the form was for those interviews, but some of the reporters I’d ask would get very officious, saying something about “Command postures,” and look at me as though I was insane. It was probably the kind of look that I gave one of them when he asked me once what I found to talk about with the grunts all the time, expecting me to confide (I think) that I found them as boring as he did.

And just-like-in-the-movies, there were a lot of correspondents who did their work, met their deadlines, filled the most preposterous assignments the best they could and withdrew, watching the war and all its hideous secrets, earning their cynicism the hard way and turning their self-contempt back out again in laughter. If New York wanted to know how the troops felt about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, they’d go out and get it. (“Would you have voted for him?” “Yeah, he was a real good man, a real good man. He was, uh, young.” “Who will you vote for now?” “Wallace, I guess.”) They’d even gather troop reflections on the choice of Paris as the site of the peace talks. (“Paris? I dunno, sure, why not? I mean, they ain’t gonna hold ’em in Hanoi, now are they?”), but they’d know how funny that was, how wasteful, how profane. They knew that, no matter how honestly they worked, their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that. ~ Michael Herr,
485:We live in a society in which mediocrity is the norm. Many people do as little as they can to get by. They don’t take pride in their work or in who they are. If somebody is watching, they may perform one way, but when nobody is watching they’ll cut corners and take the easy way out.
If you are not careful, you can be pulled into this same mentality where you think it’s okay to show up late to work, to look less than your best, or to give less than your best. But God doesn’t bless mediocrity. God blesses excellence. I have observed that the fifth undeniable quality of a winner is a commitment to excellence.
When you have a spirit of excellence, you do your best whether anyone is watching or not. You go the extra mile. You do more than you have to.
Other people may complain about their jobs. They may go around looking sloppy and cutting corners. Don’t sink to that level. Everyone else may be slacking off at work, compromising in school, letting their lawns go, but here’s the key: You are not everyone else. You are a cut above. You are called to excellence. God wants you to set the highest standard.
You should be the model employee for your company. Your boss and your supervisors should be able to say to the new hires, “Watch him. Learn from her. Pick up the same habits. Develop the same skills. This person is the cream of the crop, always on time, great attitude, doing more than what is required.”
When you have an excellent spirit like that, you will not only see promotion and increase, but you are honoring God. Some people think, “Let me go to church to honor God. Let me read my Bible to honor God.” And yes, that’s true, but it honors God just as much to get to work on time. It honors God to be productive. It honors God to look good each day.
When you are excellent, your life gives praise to God. That’s one of the best witnesses you can have. Some people will never go to church. They never listen to a sermon. They’re not reading the Bible. Instead, they’re reading your life. They’re watching how you live. Now, don’t be sloppy. When you leave the house, whether you’re wearing shorts or a three-piece suit, make sure you look the best you possibly can. You’re representing the almighty God.
When you go to work, don’t slack off, and don’t give a halfhearted effort. Give it your all. Do your job to the best of your ability. You should be so full of excellence that other people want what you have.
When you’re a person of excellence, you do more than necessary. You don’t just meet the minimum requirements; you go the extra mile. That phrase comes from the Bible. Jesus said it in Matthew 5:41--“If a soldier demands you carry his gear one mile, carry it two miles.” In those days Roman soldiers were permitted by law to require someone else to carry their armor. ~ Joel Osteen,
486:Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS. We recognize that people will continue to have sex for nonreproductive reasons despite the laws and mores. Therefore, we try to make sexual practices as safe as possible in order to minimize the spread of the AIDS viruses. In a similar way, we continually try to make our drinking water, foods, and even our pharmaceutical medicines safer. The ubiquity of chemical intoxicants in our lives is undeniable evidence of the continuing universal need for safer medicines with such applications. While use may not always be for an approved medical purpose, or prudent, or even legal, it is fulfilling the relentless drive we all have to change the way we feel, to alter our behavior and consciousness, and, yes, to intoxicate ourselves. We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition. Then we must make them as safe and risk free and as healthy as possible. Dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death. Imagine an alcohol-type substance that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, impaired driving, or workplace problems. Would you care to inhale a perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air? How would you like a pain-killer as effective as morphine but safer than aspirin, a mood enhancer that dissolves on your tongue and is more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine, a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more relaxing than a martini, or a safe sleeping pill that allows you to choose to dream or not? Perhaps you would like to munch on a user friendly hallucinogen that is as brief and benign as a good movie? This is not science fiction. As described in the following pages, there are such intoxicants available right now that are far safer than the ones we currently use. If smokers can switch from tobacco cigarettes to nicotine gum, why can’t crack users chew a cocaine gum that has already been tested on animals and found to be relatively safe? Even safer substances may be just around the corner. But we must begin by recognizing that there is a legitimate place in our society for intoxication. Then we must join together in building new, perfectly safe intoxicants for a world that will be ready to discard the old ones like the junk they really are. This book is your guide to that future. It is a field guide to that silent spring of intoxicants and all the animals and peoples who have sipped its waters. We can no more stop the flow than we can prevent ourselves from drinking. But, by cleaning up the waters we can leave the morass that has been the endless war on drugs and step onto the shores of a healthy tomorrow. Use this book to find the way. ~ Ronald K Siegel,
487:I wanted your experience of Court to be as easy as possible. Your brother just shrugged off the initial barbs and affronts, but I knew they’d slay you. We did our best to protect you from them, though your handling of the situation with Tamara showed us that you were very capable of directing your own affairs.”
“What about Elenet?” I asked, and winced, hating to sound like the kind of jealous person I admired least. But the image of that goldenwood throne had entered my mind and would not be banished.
He looked slightly surprised. “What about her?”
“People--some people--put your names together. And,” I added firmly, “she’d make a good queen. Better than I.”
He lifted his cup, and I saw my ring gleaming on his finger. He’d worn that since he left Bran and Nee’s ball. He’d been wearing it, I thought, when we sat in this very inn and he went through that terrible inner debate on whether or not I was a traitor.
I dropped my head and stared into my cup.
“Elenet,” he said, “is an old friend. We grew up together and regard one another as brother and sister, a comfortable arrangement since neither of us had siblings.”
I thought of that glance she’d given him when I spied on them in the Royal Wing courtyard. She had betrayed feelings that were not sisterly. But he hadn’t seen that look because his heart lay otherwhere.
I pressed my lips together. She was worthy, but her love was not returned. Suddenly I understood why she had been so guarded around me. The honorable course for me would be to keep to myself what I had seen.
Shevraeth continued, “She spent her time with me as a mute warning to the Merindars, who had to know that she came to report on Grumareth’s activities, and I didn’t want them trying any kind of retaliation. She realized that our social proximity would cause gossip. That was inevitable. But she heeded it not; she just wants to return to Grumareth and resume guiding her lands to prosperity again.” He paused, then said, “As for her quality, it is undeniable. But I think the time has come for a different perspective, one that is innate in you. It is a problem, I have come to realize, with our Court upbringing. No one, including Elenet, has the gift you have of looking every person you encounter in the face and accepting the person behind the status. We all were raised to see servants and merchants as faceless as we pursued the high strategy. I’m half convinced this is part of the reason why the kingdom ended up in the grip of the likes of the Merindars.”
I nodded, and for the first time comprehended what a relationship with him really meant for the rest of my life. “The goldenwood throne,” I said. “In the letter. I thought you had it ordered for, well, someone else.”
His smile was gone. “It doesn’t yet exist. How could it? Though I intend for there to be one, for the duties of ruling have to begin as a partnership. Until the other night, I had no idea if I would win you or not.”
“Win me,” I repeated. “What a contest! ~ Sherwood Smith,
488:Sweet Mother, there's a flower you have named "The Creative Word".

Yes.

What does that mean?

It is the word which creates.

There are all kinds of old traditions, old Hindu traditions, old Chaldean traditions in which the Divine, in the form of the Creator, that is, in His aspect as Creator, pronounces a word which has the power to create. So it is this... And it is the origin of the mantra. The mantra is the spoken word which has a creative power. An invocation is made and there is an answer to the invocation; or one makes a prayer and the prayer is granted. This is the Word, the Word which, in its sound... it is not only the idea, it is in the sound that there's a power of creation. It is the origin, you see, of the mantra.

In Indian mythology the creator God is Brahma, and I think that it was precisely his power which has been symbolised by this flower, "The Creative Word". And when one is in contact with it, the words spoken have a power of evocation or creation or formation or transformation; the words... sound always has a power; it has much more power than men think. It may be a good power and it may be a bad power. It creates vibrations which have an undeniable effect. It is not so much the idea as the sound; the idea too has its own power, but in its own domain - whereas the sound has a power in the material world.

I think I have explained this to you once; I told you, for example, that words spoken casually, usually without any re- flection and without attaching any importance to them, can be used to do something very good. I think I spoke to you about "Bonjour", "Good Day", didn't I? When people meet and say "Bonjour", they do so mechanically and without thinking. But if you put a will into it, an aspiration to indeed wish someone a good day, well, there is a way of saying "Good Day" which is very effective, much more effective than if simply meeting someone you thought: "Ah! I hope he has a good day", without saying anything. If with this hope in your thought you say to him in a certain way, "Good Day", you make it more concrete and more effective.

It's the same thing, by the way, with curses, or when one gets angry and says bad things to people. This can do them as much harm - more harm sometimes - than if you were to give them a slap. With very sensitive people it can put their stomach out of order or give them palpitation, because you put into it an evil force which has a power of destruction.

It is not at all ineffective to speak. Naturally it depends a great deal on each one's inner power. People who have no strength and no consciousness can't do very much - unless they employ material means. But to the extent that you are strong, especially when you have a powerful vital, you must have a great control on what you say, otherwise you can do much harm. Without wanting to, without knowing it; through ignorance.

Anything? No? Nothing?

Another question?... Everything's over? ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 347-349,
489:We are the center. In each of our minds - some may call it arrogance, or selfishness - we are the center, and all the world moves about us, and for us, and because of us. This is the paradox of community, the one and the whole, the desires of the one often in direct conflict with the needs of the whole. Who among us has not wondered if all the world is no more than a personal dream?

I do not believe that such thoughts are arrogant or selfish. It is simply a matter of perception; we can empathize with someone else, but we cannot truly see the world as another person sees it, or judge events as they affect the mind and the heart of another, even a friend.

But we must try. For the sake of all the world, we must try. This is the test of altruism, the most basic and undeniable ingredient for society. Therein lies the paradox, for ultimately, logically, we each must care more about ourselves than about others, and yet, if, as rational beings we follow that logical course, we place our needs and desires above the needs of our society, and then there is no community.

I come from Menzoberranzan, city of drow, city of self. I have seen that way of selfishness. I have seen it fail miserably. When self-indulgence rules, then all the community loses, and in the end, those striving for personal gains are left with nothing of any real value.

Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around us. Because there is nothing material that measures against the intangibles of love and friendship.

Thus, we must overcome that selfishness and we must try, we must care. I saw this truth plainly following the attack on Captain Deudermont in Watership. My first inclination was to believe that my past had precipitated the trouble, that my life course had again brought pain to a friend. I could not bear this thought. I felt old and I felt tired. Subsequently learning that the trouble was possibly brought on by Deudermont's old enemies, not my own, gave me more heart for the fight.

Why is that? The danger to me was no less, nor was the danger to Deudermont, or to Catti-brie or any of the others about us.

Yet my emotions were real, very real, and I recognized and understood them, if not their source. Now, in reflection, I recognize that source, and take pride in it. I have seen the failure of self-indulgence; I have run from such a world. I would rather die because of Deudermont's past than have him die because of my own. I would suffer the physical pains, even the end of my life. Better that than watch one I love suffer and die because of me. I would rather have my physical heart torn from my chest, than have my heart of hearts, the essence of love, the empathy and the need to belong to something bigger than my corporeal form, destroyed.

They are a curious thing, these emotions. How they fly in the face of logic, how they overrule the most basic instincts. Because, in the measure of time, in the measure of humanity, we sense those self-indulgent instincts to be a weakness, we sense that the needs of the community must outweigh the desires of the one. Only when we admit to our failures and recognize our weaknesses can we rise above them.

Together. ~ R A Salvatore,
490:. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .

But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?”

I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.

He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.”

“Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked.

After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again. ~ Ryan Boudinot,
491:The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate.

("On Symbolists And Decadents") ~ Vasily Rozanov,
492:My favourite quotes, Part Two
-- from Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" series

The Black Box

On Bosch’s first call to Henrik, the twin brother of Anneke -

Henrik: "I am happy to talk now. Please, go ahead.”

“Thank you. I, uh, first want to say as I said in my email that the investigation of your sister’s death is high priority. I am actively working on it. Though it was twenty years ago, I’m sure your sister’s death is something that hurts till this day. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, Detective. She was very beautiful and very excited about things. I miss her very much.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Over the years, Bosch had talked to many people who had lost loved ones to violence. There were too many to count but it never got any easier and his empathy never withered.


The Burning Room 2

Grace was a young saxophonist with a powerful sound. She also sang.

The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope.

It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was.

----------------

He grabbed his briefcase off his chair and walked toward the exit door. Before he got there, he heard someone clapping behind him. He turned back and saw it was Soto, standing by her desk. Soon Tim Marcia rose up from his cubicle and started to clap. Then Mitzi Roberts did the same and then the other detectives. Bosch put his back against the door, ready to push through. He nodded his thanks and held his fist up at chest level and shook it. He then went through the door and was gone.



The Burning Room 3

“What do you want to know, Bosch?”

Harry nodded. His instinct was right. The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever.

At the end of the day Rodriguez was a good cop and he wanted what Bosch wanted. He could not remain angry and mute if it might cost Orlando Merced his due.

------------

“I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away.”


“What is the other, Henrik?” Though he knew the answer.

“Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch.”

Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for.

“So am I, Henrik,” he said. “So am I.”


Angle of Investigation

1972

They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job.

Now

He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her.


The Scarecrow

At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city as diverse and exciting as Los Angeles. ~ Michael Connelly,
493:Alma Venus! [excerpt]
Trembling Creation's omnipresent sun,
Immanent Harmonist, Whose rhythms run.
Alike where midge pursues his swift romance,
Or grave stars cluster for their midnight dance 1
Bringer of fire, from what far fane despoiled?
Potter of grace, by what fell finger soiled?
In temple throned of old, or here in shame
Lurking, to Deathless YOU, of many a namePaphia, Freya, Aphrodite, Fand,
Cabiri vague, or in the fairy band
Titania, Niamh, or that Morgan fay
Our simpler eyes in. Sicily to-day
Catch at her sorcery-to YOU, whose breath
To a rippling rapture stirs the pool of Death,
I bring this coronal of rose and rue,
With golden wattle twined-and she-oak too.
The living wheels we call Creation roll
Whither and while You lead. Who are their soul!
Wheels within wheels, and whose the whirl of eyes
But Love's, Who was. Who is. Who never dies?
Wheels within wheels, but ever at the nave
Venus Pandemos, She for Whom we crave!
Wheels within wheels, but glowing from the tires
Venus Immaculate's Uranian fires!
If lovelight played not round the misty bourn
Could Life her marshy perils thread unworn?
Were Heaven's many mansions built to hold
Women and men seraphically cold?
Or does annihilation mean but this'Tristram no more desires Isolda's kiss'?
Fountains of Art that keep this old Earth fresh
Ascend to God from cisterns of the flesh:
Angel and phoenix flowered from the fires
Of virgin Ishtar's ravenous desires:
In good Nile mud incestuous Isis set
Many a tree of knowledge bearing yet:
Austere Mohammed meets at Heaven's door
Fond phantoms of his desert dreams of yore:
The shrine, the song, the picture and the bust
Are diamonds doubles of the charcoal, lust. . .
Your ruby billows floated to our ken
Many a rite that soothes the souls of men;
Swastik of Ind as once Egyptian Tau
In shining symbol utters yet Your law:
And coldest fanes for eunuch gods designed
Reveal Your girdle with their chaplets twined.
Around the Maypole, aeon-old, they dance,
Maiden and youth of Britain and of France,
Obedient to the law, forgot to-day,
That fertile gods, unshackled by their play,
From winter death will duly be reborn
And with their foison fill the ears of corn:
Or where, horizonward, Australian sand
Billows monotonous, behold Your band
Of leaf-clad lubras, swaying to the hum
Of droning wizard and barbaric drum,
In strange Unthippa dance to conjure there,
With warm wild posturing and coy despair,
Some dream-time god of golden ages dim,
That with the drama of their love for him
The waste in sympathy will fertile grow,
Emu be plentiful, the dry creeks flow,
And all the wild be rich with nut and plant,
Witchetty grub and root and honey-ant:
Virgins and boys, who with the bridal pair
And hymeneal chant through Athens bear
That casket strange, unknowing that inside
The mysteries of Aphrodite hide,
Ye will acknowledge too, in turn, ere long,
Omnipotent the goddess of my song:
And, childless ones of Ind, with prayer ye pour
Oil on that shrine to-day, as wives of yore
On wayside Jahv or god of boundary,
For benison of grudged fertility. . . .
Let pale usurpers of Your old domain
In crumbling book and vapid hymn maintain
That You, great Queen, are dead, that nevermore
Shall devotee Your majesty adore,
Or sad Meander wail as long ago
For torn Adonis and Your helpless woe:
We hear in beating hearts another rune,
In hymn of man and maid another tune:
On every road Your living creatures draw,
Whither You list, the Tables of Your Law:
Wherever tree hath sap or being breath,
Ubiquitous, You bruise the head of Death:
Here, pallid cuckoo's great crescendos call
His coy companion to Your festival:
There, magpie warbles to the morning star
The advent of the rapture that You are:
And desolate the spirit unaware
Of quivering enchantment in the air
When August struggles from his gaoler's power,
And gleaming envoys from each wooing flower
Cajole the bees to waft his tender dues
To some dear tabernacle's secret cruse;
When listening almonds weary of the night
Hearing You coming blossom into white;
When wattle waking from her torpor cold
Knowing You near her trembles into gold;
When, ancient symbols realizing here,
Gabriel Spring announces every year
To expectant Nature's myriad maidenhood,
In rolling plain or solitary wood,
The miracle that maketh Life complete,
The brooding Presence of the Paraclete.
*
Magi profounder than the Eastern Three
Followed the Star of Your Epiphany:
Isis had hidden with a sullen pall
The secret of the Universe from all,
Until Lucretius wondering found a fold,
It swayed to Goethe's eyes, and, growing bold,
Darwin stooped down and groping patiently
Out of the dust lifted the hem, till we
Staggering saw against the eternal blue
The secret Builder of Creation-You I ...
'When Love was driven from the world by stark
And sexless mattoids of the Ages Dark,
Disgusted lore to Moorish havens fled,
The Muses nine with eunuch monks were wed:
Primordial terror to the day returned,
The witch in hordes and great Servetus burned:
Celibate piety with thumb uncouth
Plastered a fig-leaf over Plato's truth:
Aquinas thinned, to make a draught divine,
With holy water, Aristotle's wine;
Round every comer eft or devil stares,
And very Dante mumbles craven prayers;
The childish painter daubs his maudlin fears,
And song forgets to sing a thousand years.
Yet You had lingered cunningly concealed
Now in an altar-piece, now in a field
With shards of pillared grandeur buried deep,
Until the nightmare passed. Yea, did You peep
A moment now and then, ere rose the sun,
Under the hood of a rose-hearted nun
At Abelard, or told the tale so well
Of Launcelot that even glowering hell
Drove not Francesca from her lover's wraith;
Yea, visored chivalry unhorsed his faith,
And far Jerusalem and Paynim tryst
Forgot, for victory in a gender list
Where with the provocation of a smile
Your ambushed omnipresence would beguile
Crusader sullen to a softer creed,
Knight errant to an errant knight indeed....
As what strange god did You entice the King
Through brave Uriah's comely wife to fling
Harp and the psaltery aside to plan
As mean a deed as had polluted man
Till Sextus lusted, or her father's knife
Rescued Virginia from the hell of life?
Yea, there is that in You man dare not face:
A dark star dogs Your limpid planet's grace:
Jetsam from old pollution stales Your shore:
Lewd gargoyles grin above Your temple door. ...
Wormwood is waiter at Your choicest feast,
Your Beauty shadowed ever by the Beast.
Yon feudal lord of mediaeval France,
Your devotee of many a Rose Romance,
Hath on his peasants' daughters' bridal nights
Exacted to the full his shameful rights:
Your cuckoo calling Spring into the wood
Was stark nest-brother to a robin's brood:
And, tragi-comedy of humble life,
That doting husband of the buxom wife
Is fondling (while You laugh) the child she gave
At Your still altar to some passing knave. . ..
Was it a glimpse of phases fell that mar
The radiant round of Your auspicious star,
That drove the hermit to the wilderness
From demons lurking in Your least caress,
And bade the nun, as once the vestal too,
Renounce Your works and all Your pomps-and You?
Yea, those whose eyes can pierce the dazzling veil
Of Light that is Your mask have told a tale
Of how we in the world were once expelled
From Paradise, and now, in prison held,
On moaning treadmills of repeated lives
Work out our crimes, until the hour arrives
For life to cease on earth and You to fade
With all the woe Your temptress wiles have made.
You are the gaoler of that prison, Who
(For so they say) inveigle all to woo,
Be won, that so by our own ardours we
Keep lit Your hell, yea, for eternity,
Unless, until, ignoring all You say,
As monk, as nun, we dare to disobey.
If so it be, then were the barren one
Blest of all women underneath the sun,
An angel of the Lord sent here to ray
The midnight of the soul with coming day;
The tower impregnable that masters Fate
Is not the Caesar but the celibate;
And he at whom no woman ever smiled
Is everlasting Heaven's favoured child
Ordained (who knows?) in what benignant star
As Baptist of some glorious Avatar,
Whose Word shall cause all flesh to cease to be
And man be one again with Deity!. . .
Or when the veil we call Reality
Rifts, and the meaning of it all we see,
Will Good and Evil kiss and understand?
God walk with brother Satan hand in hand?
The cool-haired Night repose beside the Sun?
Pandemos prove with Love Uranian one?
The Tree of Life mature its golden fruits
From bark so sinister and those wan roots?
Slowly our interrogating eyes
Sobered with long deception recognize,
'Mid older clues dissolved to flecks, at last
One signal flashing from the Outer Vast,
Fell or benign (as falls or rises faith),
Comet or guiding star-Your rosy wraith!
Your rosy wraith that both in man and weed
'Writes deep and undeniable Your creed'Beget or hear, though ye to-morrow die,
Beget or bear, nor ask the reason why 1
Though sun and earth shall duly pass away,
Though all the gods shall ripen and decay,
It is Their Will Who bade the world exist:
And woe to him or her who doth not list
The sole clear mandate from the Otherwhere
Flushed through the Universe-Beget or bear 1'
Love we or dread we may not all ignore
The single beacon on the circling shore
Where Being laps upon the caverned steep
Wherefrom we drifted and whereto we creep.
Beacon 1 although You lead us but to gloom!
A guiding star, it may be, to the tomb!
Comet flung from the Void through trackless Light!
Yet is Your rosy flame in ion mite
And great pathetic man the only trace
Of something more than chance in Time and Space,
That purpose dimly threads the crazy web,
That tides of anguish ultimately ebb,
That green hope signals underground a Nile,
That faith is wiser than an ostrich wile,
That there is something in us will elude
The withering fingers of vicissitude,
And man's ripe earth by a guttering sun betrayed
Will not in cold and useless ruin fade.
Question the sibyl grottoes near or far
Whither or whence we sail or why we are!
Listen at Nature's beating heart for clue,
And every oracle we know or knew!
From Zodiac round of older destiny,
From tiny orbit of an atomy,
From Pythoness or oak or Magian fire,
Augur antique or wizard new inquire,
Austral churinga or the crystal ball,
'Wherefore does anything exist at all?'
Of star or fungus seek, of life or death,
Whence Being came and whither wandereth!
10
Ask of the gloom that locks the secret in,
Ask of the light that saw the world begin!
The day, the night, and death and life are dumb:
From fungus, star or ball no answers come:
Silent, churinga, table, passing bird:
From fire or Druid oak no guiding word:
The Pythoness ambiguously sighs:
Orbit minute nor Zodiac house replies:
But dim the beating heart amid its sobs
With 'Alma Venus!' 'Alma Venus!' throbs;
While on two sibyl leaves, by a world-wind strange
Blown to our shore across the gulf of Change,
'Increase and multiply' on one is scrolled
In ochre crude, on one, in glowing gold
Around the pearly nimbus of a dove,
The script imperishable-'God is Love.'
~ Bernard O'Dowd,
494:Cold Calls: War Music, Continued
Many believe in the stars.
Take Quinamid
The son of a Dardanian astrologer
Who disregarded what his father said
And came to Troy in a taxi.
Gone.
Odysseus to Greece:
“Hector has never fought this far from Troy.
We want him further out. Beyond King Ilus’ tower.
So walk him to the centre of the plain and, having killed him,
Massacre the Trojans there.”
“Ave!”
Immediately beyond the ridge is Primrose Hill
Where Paris favoured Aphrodité.
“Take it,” said Hector.
Greece shouted: “Hurry up!”
Troy shouted: “Wait for us!”
See,
Far off,
Masts behind the half-built palisade.
Then
Nearer to yourselves
Scamánder’s ford
From which the land ascends
Then merges with the centre of the plain—
The tower (a ruin) its highest point.
Heaven.
Bad music.
Queen Hera is examining her gums.
Looking in through a window
Teenaged Athena says:
“Trouble for Greece.”
They leave.
Sea.
Sky.
The sunlit snow.
Two armies on the plain.
Hector, driven by Lutie,
His godchild and his nephew,
Going from lord to Trojan lord:
“The ships by dark.”
The ruined tower.
In front of it—
Their banners rising one by one.
One after one, and then another one—
50,000 Greeks.
And on a rise in front of Greece
Two hero lords:
Ajax the Great of Salamis
Behind his shield—
As fifty Trojan shields
Topped with blue plumes, swivelling their points,
Come up the rise—
Lord Teucer (five feet high and five feet wide)
Loading his bow,
Peering round Ajax’ shield,
Dropping this Trojan plume or that,
Ordering his archers to lie flat,
Promising God as many sheep as there are sheep to count
If he can put a shaft through Hector’s neck.
Prosperity!
Beneath the blue, between the sea, the snow, there
Hector is
Surrendering the urn of one he has just killed
To one who thought that he had killed the same.
Lord Teucer’s eye/Prince Hector’s throat.
But God would not. The bowstring snaps.
Outside God’s inner court.
Queen Hera and Athena still in line.
Hera so angry she can hardly speak.
A voice:
“The Wife, the Daughter.”
“You go. His face will make me
heave.”
“Serene and Dignified Grandee.”
“Papa to you.”
“Papa”—His hand—
“I know you do not want the Holy Family
visiting the plain.
But some of us would like to help the Greeks.
They lost their champion she.
Thousands of them have died. Now they are in retreat.
Please look.”
The plain.
“You will come back the moment that I call?”
“Of course, Papa.”
“Then . . . yes. Encourage Greece.
But voices only.
Words. Shouts. That sort of thing. A move—and home you come.”
“Of course, Papa.”
The plain.
Lord Teucer’s archers hidden in its grass.
Chylábborak, Lord Hector’s brother-in-law, to his blue plumes:
“Move!”
“Move!”
And on their flanks, between the sea and snow,
Led by Teléspiax’ silver yard
All Ilium’s masks
“Down came their points. Out came their battle cry.
And our cool Mr 5 x 5 called: ‘Up.’ And up we got
And sent our arrows into them,
That made them pirouette,
Topple back down the rise, leaving their dead
For some of us to strip, and some, the most,
To pause, to point, to plant, a third, a fourth
Volley into their naked backs. Pure joy!”
Chylábborak,
Holding his ground:
“Centre on me.
More die in broken than in standing ranks.
Apollo! Aphrodité! Our gods are here!
You taste the air, you taste their breath!
The Greek fleet, ours, by dark!”
Then he is ringed.
See an imperial pig harassed by dogs.
How, like a masterchef his crêpes,
He tosses them; and on their way back down
Eviscerates, then flips them back into the pack.
Likewise Chylábborak the Greeks who rushed.
Hector has seen it. As—
Beneath the blue, the miles of empty air,
Him just one glitter in that glittering mass—
The hosts begin to merge.
Fine dust clouds mixed with beams of light.
The Prince, down from his plate.
Either sides’ arrows whingeing by:
“Cover my back.”
Finding a gap
Dismissing blows as gales do slates,
Then at a run, leaping into the ring,
Taking Chylábborak’s hand:
“If you don’t mind?”
Agamemnon:
“Our time has come. God keeps his word.
Fight now as you have never fought.
We will be at Troy’s gates by dusk,
Through them by dark,
By dawn, across our oars,
As we begin our journey home,
Watching the windmills on its Wall
Turn their sails in flames.”
Heaven. The Wife. The Daughter.
Hands release black lacquer clasps inlaid with particles of gold.
Silk sheaths—with crashing waves and fishscales woven on a
navy ground—
Flow on the pavement.
Hands take their hands
While other hands supply
Warwear,
Their car,
And put the reins into Athena’s hands.
“. . . Troy’s gates by dusk,
Through them by dark . . .”
The Hours, the undeniable,
Open the gates of Paradise.
Beyond
The wastes of space.
Before
The blue.
Below
Now near
The sea, the snow.
All time experts in hand-to-hand action—
Friecourt, Okinawa, Stalingrad West—
Could not believe the battle would gain.
But it did.
10
Chylábborak’s ring is ringed. And then no ring at all.
Some Trojans raise their hands in prayer;
Some Panachéans shout for joy and wait to drag the corpses off.
Lutie, alone, the reins in one, his other hand
Hacking away the hands that grab his chariot’s bodywork,
Rearing his horses, Starlight and Bertie, through,
To,
Yes,
Chylábborak up; rescued;
Prince Hector covering. Then:
“Zoo-born wolf! Front for a family of thieves!”
Lord Diomed, on foot, with Sethynos.
My Lutie answering:
“Be proud Prince Hector is your Fate.”
(Which will be so,
Though Lutie will not see it.)
Chylábborak and Hector do not want to disappoint this oily pair:
“Here come the Sisters Karamazof, Spark,”
Chylábborak said. “Let’s send them home in halves.”
And jumped back down.
Around the tower, 1000 Greeks, 1000 Ilians, amid their swirl,
His green hair dressed in braids, each braid
Tipped with a little silver bell, note
Nyro of Simi—the handsomest of all the Greeks, save A.
The trouble was, he had no fight. He dashed from fight to fight,
Struck a quick blow, then dashed straight out again.
Save that this time he caught,
As Prince Aenéas caught his breath,
That Prince’s eye; who blocked his dash,
And as Lord Panda waved and walked away,
Took his head off his spine with a backhand slice—
Beautiful stuff . . . straight from the blade . . .
Still, as it was a special head,
Mowgag, Aenéas’ minder—
Bright as a box of rocks, but musical—
11
Spiked it, then hoisted it, and twizzling the pole
Beneath the blue, the miles of empty air,
Marched to the chingaling of its tinklers,
A knees high majorette
Towards the Greeks, the tower.
A roar of wind across the battlefield.
A pause.
And then
Scattering light,
The plain turned crystal where their glidepath stopped,
The Queen of Heaven shrills: “Typhoid for Troy!”
And through poor Nyro’s wobbling mouth
Athena yells:
“Slew of assiduous mediocrities!
Meek Greeks!”
It is enough.
Centre-plain wide,
Lit everywhere by rays of glorious light,
They rushed their standards into Ilium,
Diomed (for once) swept forward;
Converting shame to exaltation with his cry:
“Never—to Helen’s gold without her self!
Never—to Helen’s self
without her gold!”
Mowgag well slain.
Hewn through his teeth, his jaw slashed off,
And Nyro’s head beside him in the grass.
When Nyro’s mother heard of this
12
She shaved her head; she tore her frock; she went outside
Ripping her fingernails through her cheeks:
Then down her neck; her chest; her breasts;
And bleeding to her waist ran round the shops,
Sobbing:
“God, kill Troy.
Console me with its death.
Revenge is all I have.
My boy was kind. He had his life to live.
I will not have the chance to dance in Hector’s blood,
But let me hear some have before I die.”
“I saw her running round.
I took the photograph.
It summed the situation up.
He was her son.
They put it out in colour. Right?
My picture went around the
world.”
Down the shaft of the shot in his short-staved bow
Lord Panda has been follow-spotting Diomed.
Between “her self ” / “her gold” he shoots.
It hits. And as its barbs protrude through Dio’s back
Aenéas hears Lord Panda shout:
“He bleeds! The totem Greek! Right-shoulder-front!
How wise of Artemis to make
Panda her matador! Her numero uno! Moi!”
Diomed hit,
The heart went out of those who followed him
And they fell back.
Shields all round
Diomed on his knees
13
Lifting his hands:
“Sister and wife of God”
As Sethynos breaks off the arrowhead
“Eliminate my pain.”
Settles his knee beneath his hero’s shoulderblades
“Let me kill that oaf who claims my death”
Bridges his nape with one hand
“Before it comes with honour to my name.”
Then with his other hand
In one long strong slow pull
Drew the shank back, and out.
She heard his prayer.
Before their breathless eyes
His blood ran back into the pout the shank had left,
And to complete her miracle
Lord Diomed rose up between them, stood in the air,
Then hovered down onto his toes
Brimming with homicidal joy,
Imparting it to Greece.
Then Troy was driven back,
Trampling the half-stripped still-masked carcasses
Hatching the centre of the plain.
Aenéas / Panda.
“Get him.”
14
“Get him! I got him. He is dead. But there he is.”
And Diomed has spotted them.
“Calm down,” Aenéas said. “Perhaps he is possessed.”
“What god would visit him?”
“So pray to yours—and try another shot.”
“Huntress,” Lord Panda prays,
Bright-ankled god of nets and lines,
Of tangled mountains, ilex groves and dark cascades . . .”
But Artemis was bored with him
And let him rise, still praying hard,
Into the downflight of the javelin
Diomed aired at Prince Aenéas.
Sunlit, it went through Panda’s lips, out through his neck, and then
Through Biblock’s neck.
And so they fell; the lord, face up; the friend, face down
Gripping the blood-smeared barb between his teeth,
Between the sea and snow.
Aenéas covers them.
Eyeing his plate
—Technology you can enjoy—
Diomed found, and threw, a stone
As heavy as a cabbage made of lead,
That hit, and split, Aenéas’ hip.
Who went down on one knee
And put his shield hand on the grass
And with his other hand covered his eyes.
Dido might have become a grandmother
And Rome not had its day, except
As Diomed came on to lop his top
Aenéas’ mama, Aphrodité (dressed
In grey silk lounge pyjamas piped with gold
And snake-skin flip-flops) stepped
15
Between him and the Greek.
A glow came from her throat, and from her hair
A fragrance that betokened the divine.
Stooping, she kissed him better, as
Queen Hera whispered: “Greek, cut that bitch.”
And, Diomed, you did; nicking Love’s wrist.
Studying the ichor as
It seeped across her pulse into her palm
Our Lady of the Thong lifted her other hand
Removed a baby cobra from her hair
And dropped it, Diomed, onto your neck,
And saw its bite release its bane into your blood.
Then nobody could say
Who Diomed fought for, or for what he fought.
Rapt through the mass
Now shouting at the sky, now stomping on the plain,
He killed and killed and killed, Greek, Trojan, Greek,
Lord/less, shame/fame, both gone; and gone
Loyalty nurtured in the face of death,
The duty of revenge, the right to kill,
To jeer, to strip, to gloat, to be the first
To rally but the last to run, all gone—
And gone, our Lady Aphrodité, giggling.
While everywhere,
Driving your fellow Greeks
Back down the long incline that leads to the Scamánder’s ford,
Surely as when
Lit from the dark part of the sky by sudden beams,
A bitter wind
Detonates line by line of waves against the shore.
No mind. Even as Teucer backed away
He kept his eyes on you.
“You feel the stress? You feel the fear?
Behold your enemy! the Prince God loves!”
See Teucer’s bow. Hear Teucer’s: “This time lucky.”
16
His—
But this time it was not our Father, God,
Who saved your life, my Prince.
As Agamemnon cried:
“The ships are safe.
Stand at the riverside’s far bank.”
Teléspiax heard the rustle of Lord Teucer’s shot
And stood between yourself and it.
His head was opened, egglike, at the back,
Mucked with thick blood, blood trickling from his mouth.
His last words were:
“Prince, your trumpeter has lost his breath.”
“Our worst fear was his face would fade,”
Teléspiax’s father said.
“But it did not. We will remember it until we die.”
“Give his instrument to Hogem,” Hector said, and went—
Lutie on reins—between the sea and snow,
Throwing his chariots wide, Scamánderwards,
As easily as others might a cloak.
Diomed among this traffic, on his own,
Among his dead,
Their pools of blood, their cut-off body-parts,
Their cut-off heads,
Ashamed as his head cleared
To see Odysseus, Idomeneo, the Ajax—Big and Small—
Whipping away downslope, shouting towards Odysseus:
“Where are you going with your back to the battle?”
Who shouted back, although he did not turn:
“Look left!”
And there was Lutie driving Hector onto him,
Sure they would trample him, for sure
Queen Hera’s human, Diomed,
Would stand and die, except:
“Arms up, young king—” Nestor, full tilt,
Reins round his tummy, leaning out “—and
17
Jump . . .” wrists locked “. . . You young are just . . .”
Swinging him up onto the plate “. . . too much.”
“With your permission, Da?”
Nod. Drew. Then threw the chariot’s javelin
As Lutie spun his wheels, and Hector threw—
Those skewers trading brilliance as they passed—
And missed—both vehicles slither-straightening,
Regaining speed, close, close, then driven apart
By empty cars careering off the incline,
Or stationary cars, their horses cropping grass.
“Daddy, go slow. Hector will say I ran.”
“But not the widows you have made.”
And slow
And low
Cruising the blue above this mix
Heaven’s Queen and Ringsight-eyed Athena
Trumpeting down huge worms of sound
As Hector’s car rereached king Nestor’s, and:
“What kept you, Prince?” Diomed offered as they came abreast:
“You went for a refreshing towel?”
And threw his axe, that toppled through the air, and, oh,
Hector, my Hector, as you thought:
“If Heaven helps me Heaven shows it loves the best,”
Parted your Lutie’s mesh and smashed into his heart.
What did you say as God called you to death
Dear Lutie?
“King Prince, I leave you
driverless.”
And put the reins into his hands, and fled
Into oblivion
As Hector with his other hand
Held what his Lutie was, upright, face forwards, in between
The chariot’s basket and himself,
Shouting as he drove after them:
“Loathsome Greek,
18
Your loathsome hair, your loathsome blood,
Your loathsome breath, your loathsome heart,
Jump in your loathsome ships,
I will come after you,
Come over the Aegean after you,
And find you though you hide inside
Your loathsome father’s grave
And with my bare hands twist your loathsome head
Off your loathsome neck.”
There was a Greek called Themion.
Mad about armour. If not armour, cars.
Of course he went to Troy. And Troy
Saw a stray spear transfix him as he drove.
Companionably, his horses galloped up
On Starlight’s side, and muddled Starlight down,
And Bertie down, and brought the Prince
(Still holding Lutie) down, as all the world
Hurried, as if by windheads, on towards Scamánder’s ford.
hether you reach it from the palisade
Or through the trees that dot the incline’s last stretch
You hear Scamánder’s voice before you see
What one may talk across on quiet days
Its rippling sunspangled breadth
Streaming across the bars of pebbly sand
That form its ford
—Though on the Fleet’s side deeper, darkly bright.
And here
Tiptoeing from this bar to that,
Settling the cloudy sunshine of her hair,
Her towel retained by nothing save herself,
The god of Tops and Thongs
Our Lady Aphrodité came,
Her eyes brimfull with tears.
Scamánder is astonished by his luck.
19
“Beauty of Beauties, why are you weeping?”
“I have been hurt, Scamánder.”
“No . . .”
“Humiliated.”
“No . . .”
“Me. A god. Just like yourself. Touched . . .”
“Touched!”
“By a man.”
“A man!”
“A Greek.”
“Death to all Greeks!”
“He cut me!”
“Sacrilege!
. . . But where?”
“I need your healing touch.”
“How can I help you if you do not show me where?”
“Moisten its lips and my wound will be healed.”
“You must say where!”
“Well . . .”
The towel has slipped an inch.
“I am afraid you will be disappointed.”
“Never.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“You will not criticize me?”
“No!”
Her wrist upturned.
Out-turned.
Her opened palm.
Fanning the fingers of her other hand,
Stroking his spangles with her fingertips.
“Goddess, I love you.
I have always loved you.
Say that you love me. Even a little.
I beg you. God grant it.”
“I need your help, Scamánder.”
“Take pity on me. Come into me.”
“You have your nymphs.”
“Bores! Bores!”
“I might be nibbled by an eel!”
“Death to all eels!”
The towel is down.
20
“Step into me . . .
I love your toes . . . please let me kiss your toes . . .
Your little dinkum-inkum toes . . .”
“No one has kissed them so nicely, Scamánder.”
“And now your knees . . .”
“You tickle me . . .”
“And now your thighs!”
“Oh, oh, go on . . .”
“And now your bum!
Your Holy Bum! Your Sacred Bum!
The Bum of Paradise!”
“Oh, my Scamánder, I must have your help . . .”
“Anything!”
The towel goes curling off,
And as she floated on his stream
Our Lady Aphrodité said:
“At any moment now the Greeks will reach your
Troy-side bank . . .”
Recall those sequences
When horsemen ride out of the trees and down into a
Somewhere in Kansas or Missouri, say.
So—save they were thousands—Greece
Into Scamánder’s ford.
stream
Coming downstream,
A smallish wave
That passes
But
Scamánder’s flow does not relapse.
Indeed
Almost without a sound
Its murmuring radiance rose
Into a dark, torrential surge,
Clouded with boulders, crammed with trees, as clamorous
21
as if it were a sea,
That lifted Greece, then pulled Greece down,
Cars gone, masks gone, gone under, reappearing, gone:
“Onto your knees! Praise Hector for this flood!
The Prince God loves!” Prince Hector claims
As he comes through the trees.
They do.
Then up and run, run, thousands of them,
To hold those Greeks who got back out
Under until their bubbles stopped; while those swept off
Turned somersaults amid Scamánder’s undertow.
The flat—
1000 yards of it between the river and the palisade.
The King:
“The Lord has not abandoned us.
To cross will be as bad for them.”
But it was not to be as bad for them.
Indeed,
As Hector drove towards Scamánder’s brink,
And as—their banners rising one by one,
One after one and then another one—
He and all Ilium began to enter it,
The river reassumed its softly-spoken, smooth, sunspangled way.
And Agamemnon cried:
“God, what are You for?
What use are You to me?”
As Hector cries:
22
“Two miracles!
Your Prince is close to God!”
And Hera to Athena:
“Fog?”
And fog came down.
And most of Greece got out.
Troy holding hands midstream.
An army peering through its masks.
Miss Tops and Thongs to God:
“Your Hera has . . .”
And with a wish He turned the fog to light
And with a word He called them back to Heaven.
Sky.
Snow.
The 1000 yards.
The palisade.
Hector:
“I am your Prince.
My name means He-Who-Holds.
Troy. And the plain. And now the ships.
For Troy!” his battle cry,
Rising into a common cry, that cry
Into a clamour, and that clamour to
Bayings of hatred.
23
800 yards.
The Child:
“We are the Greeks. We fight to win. If one is lost,
Close his eyes, step over him, and kill his enemy.”
800 yards.
The Greeks are tiring.
Nestor is on his knees:
“God of all Gods, Most Holy and Most High,
If Greece has ever sacrificed fresh blood to you,
Protect our ships.”
Heaven.
Soft music. Summertime. Queen Hera and Athena? Yes . . .
Some lesser gods
Observing their approach, approach,
Salaam, and then
Lead them—
Now both in black wraparound tops—
To God:
“Darling Daddy, here we are.”
“And” (Hera) “here we stay
Until you stop that worthless Hector killing Greeks.”
Up steps Love.
Hera: “Why is she wearing a tent?”
Love: “Father, see this.” (Her wrist.)
“Human strikes god! Communism! The end of everything!”
“Darlings,” He said,
“You know that being a god means being blamed.
Do this—no good. Do that—the same. The answer is:
Avoid humanity.
Remember—I am God.
I see the bigger picture.”
24
“And I am Hera, Heaven’s Queen,
Greece worships me.”
“Stuff Greece,” Love said.
“Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples
Hates Troy because Troy’s Paris put her last
When we stripped off for him.
As for the Ithacan boat-boy’s undercurved preceptatrix,
She hates Troy because my statue stands on its acropolis.”
Hera: “The cities’ whores were taxed to pay for it.”
Love (Dropping onto her knees before Himself):
“Please . . . stop them harming Troy. The greatest city
in the world.”
While Hera and Athena sang:
“Cleavage! Cleavage!
Queen of the Foaming Hole.
Mammoth or man or midge
She sucks from pole to pole.”
And God has had enough of it.
Lifting His scales He said:
“Hector will have his day of victory.”
Then crashed them to the ground.
700 yards.
The palisade.
Its gate.
Late sunlight on gilt beaks.
“There’s no escape from Troy.”
“Or from the plain at Troy.”
25
Begging for ransom, Trojan Hoti,
His arms around King Menelaos’ knees.
King Agamemnon: “Off.”
Then he punched Hoti in the face.
Then punched him in the face again.
And then again. And when he fell
King Agamemnon kicked him in the groin.
Kicking him in the groin with so much force
It took a step to follow up each kick.
Then pulled him up,
Then dragged him by his hair
This way and that,
Then left him, calling:
“Finish him off.”
And someone did.
“I was sixteen. I said: ‘Where is Achilles?’
Hard as it is to share another’s troubles when your own are pressing
Great Ajax took my hands in his and said:
‘He loves us. He is with us. He will come.’”
But he did not.
Then Ajax to himself:
“Dear Lord, you made me straight.
Give me the strength to last till dark.”
The Prince: “I get past
Their war is lost.”
everything I see.
It was.
Aenéas, Ábassee, Sarpédon, Gray,
Calling to one another down the line.
Then, with a mighty wall of sound,
As if a slope of stones
Rolled down into a lake of broken glass
26
We ran at them.
And now the light of evening has begun
To shawl across the plain:
Blue gray, gold gray, blue gold,
Translucent nothingnesses
Readying our space,
Within the deep, unchanging sea of space,
For Hesper’s entrance, and the silver wrap.
Covered with blood, mostly their own,
Loyal to death, reckoning to die
Odysseus, Ajax, Diomed,
Idomeneo, Nestor, Menelaos
And the King:
“Do not die because others have died.”
“Do not show them the palms of your hands.”
“Achil!”
“Achil!”
“If he won’t help us, Heaven help us.”
“Stand still and fight.”
“Feel shame in one another’s eyes.”
“I curse you, God. You are a liar, God.
Troy will be yours by dark—immortal lies.”
“Home!”
“Home!”
“There’s no such place.”
“You can’t launch burning ships.”
“More men survive if no one runs.”
But that is what Greece did.
Dropping their wounded,
Throwing down their dead,
Their shields, their spears, their swords,
They ran.
27
Leaving their heroes tattered, filthy, torn
And ran
And ran
Above their cries:
“I am the Prince! The victory is mine!”
Chylábborak:
“Do not take cowardice for granted.”
Scarce had he said it, when
His son, Kykéon, standing next to him
Took Ajax’ final spear cast in his chest.
“I shall not wear your armour, Sir,” he said.
And died.
“My son is dead.”
The Prince:
“Hector is loved by God.”
And Greece, a wall of walking swords,
But walking backwards,
Leaving the plain in silence
And in tears.
Idomeneo,
Running back out at those Trojans who came too close:
“You know my name. Come look for me. And boy,
The day you do will be the day you die.”
28
Hector to Troy:
“Soldiers!—
Unmatched my force, unconquerable my will.
After ten years of days, in one long day
To be remembered for as many days
As there are days to come, this is my day,
Your Hector’s day. Troy given back to Troy.
My day of victory!”
And when the cheering died:
“Some say: destroy Greece now. But I say no.
Out of your cars. Eat by your fires.
Two hundred fires! Around each fire
Five hundred men!
“The sound of grindstones turning through the night,
The firelight that stands between our blades,
So let King Agamemnon’s Own hold hands
And look into each other’s frightened eyes.
“True God! Great Master of the Widespread Sky!
If only you would turn
Me into a god,
As you, through me,
Tomorrow by their ships
Will see Greece die.”
Silence.
A ring of lights.
Within
Immaculate
In boat-cloaks lined with red
King Agamemnon’s lords—
The depression of retreat.
29
The depression of returning to camp.
Him at the centre of their circle
Sobbing,
Then shouting:
“We must run for it!”
Dark glasses in parked cars.
“King Agamemnon of Mycenae,
God called, God raised, God recognized,
You are a piece of shit,” Diomed said.
Silence again.
“Let us praise God,” Lord Ajax said,
“That Hector stopped before he reached the ships.”
Silence again.
Then
Nestor
(Putting his knee back in):
“Paramount Agamemnon, King of Kings,
Lord of the Shore, the Islands and the Sea
I shall begin, and end, with you.
Greece needs good words. Like them or not, the credit
will be yours.
Determined. Keen to fight, that is our Diomed—
As I should know. When just a boy of ten I fought
Blowback of Missolonghi, a cannibal, drank blood,
He captured you, he buggered you, you never walked again.
But Diomed lacks experience.
God has saved us, momentarily.
God loves Achilles.
You took, and you have kept, Achilles’ ribband she.”
“I was a fool!”
30
“And now you must appease him, Agamemnon.
Humble words. Hands shaken. Gifts.”
The King—wiping his eyes:
“As usual,
Pylos has said the only things worth hearing.
I was mad to take the she.
I shall pay fitting damages.
Plus her, I offer him
The Corfiot armour that my father wore.”
Silence.
The sea.
Its whispering.
“To which I add: a set of shields.
Posy, standard, ceremonial.
The last, cut from the hide of a one ton Lesbian bull.”
Silence.
The sea.
“And . . . a chariot!
From my own équipe!
They smoke along the ground . . .
They ride its undulations like a breeze . . .”
The sea.
“Plus: six horses—saddled, bridled and caparisoned,
Their grooms and veterinarians . . .
. . . And six tall shes:
Two good dancers, two good stitchers, two good cooks.
All capable of bearing boys . . .
“Oh, very well then: twenty loaves of gold,
31
The same of silver, and the same of iron.”
Masks. Lights.
Behind the lords
Some hundreds from the army have walked up.
Lord Nestor smiles.
Lord Menelaos smiles.
“Plus—
Though it may well reduce your King to destitution:
A’kimi’kúriex,
My summer palace by the Argive sea,
Its lawns, its terraces, its curtains in whose depths
Larks dive above a field of waving lilies
And fishscale-breakers shatter on blue rocks.
Then, as he draws their silky heights aside,
Standing among huge chests of looted booty,
Long necked, with lowered lids, but candid eyes,
My living daughter, Íphaniss, a diamond
Big as a cheeseball for her belly stud.
His wife to be! minus—I need not say—her otherwise huge
bride-price.”
“More!”
“More!”
“More!”
Lord Ajax almost has to hold him up.
“The whole of eastern Pel’po’nesia—
An area of outstanding natural beauty—
Its cities, Epi’dávros, Trów’é’zen,
Their fortresses, their harbours and their fleets,
Their taxpayers—glad to accept his modest ways—
All this, the greatest benefaction ever known,
If he agrees to fight. And he admits I am his King.”
Instantly, Nestor:
“An offer God himself could not refuse.
All that remains to say is:
Who shall take it to Achilles?”
32
Agamemnon: “You will.”
Starlight.
The starlight on the sea.
The sea.
Its whispering
Mixed with the prayers
Of Ajax and of Nestor as they walk
Along the shore towards Achilles’ gate.
“My lords?”
“Your lord.”
“This way.”
They find him, with guitar,
Singing of Gilgamesh.
“Take my hands. Here they are.”
You cannot take your eyes away from him.
His own so bright they slow you down.
His voice so low, and yet so clear.
You know that he is dangerous.
“Patroclus?
33
Friends in need.
Still,
Friends.
That has not changed,
I think.
Autómedon? Wine.
“Dear Lord and Master of the Widespread Sky,
Accept ourselves, accept our prayers.”
Their cups are taken.
“Father friend?”
King Nestor (for his life):
“You know why we are here.
We face death.
The mass choose slavery.
Mycenae has admitted he was wrong to wrong yourself.
In recompense he offers you
The greatest benefaction ever known.
Take it, and fight. Or else Hector will burn the ships
Then kill us randomly.
Remember what your Father said
The day when Ajax and myself drove up to ask
If you could come with us to Troy?
That you should stand among the blades where honour grows.
And secondly, to let your anger go.
Spirit, and strength, and beauty have combined
Such awesome power in you
A vacant Heaven would offer you its throne.
Think of what those who will come after us will say.
Save us from Hector’s god, from Hector, and from Hector’s force.
I go down on my knees to you, Achilles.”
“I must admire your courage, father friend,
For treating me as if I was a fool.
34
I shall deal with Hector as I want to.
You and your fellow countrymen will die
For how your King has treated me.
I have spent five years fighting for your King.
My record is: ten coastal and ten inland cities
Burnt to the ground. Their males, massacred.
Their cattle, and their women, given to him.
Among the rest, Briseis the Beautiful, my ribband she.
Not that I got her courtesy of him.
She joined my stock in recognition of
My strength, my courage, my superiority,
Courtesy of yourselves, my lords.
I will not fight for him.
He aims to personalise my loss.
Briseis taken from Achilles—standard practice:
Helen from Menelaos—war.
Lord Busy Busy, building his palisade, mounting my she,
One that I might have picked to run my house,
Raising her to the status of a wife.
Do I hate him? Yes, I hate him. Hate him.
And should he be afraid of me? He should.
I want to harm him. I want him to feel pain.
In his body, and between his ears.
I must admit,
Some of the things that you have said are true.
But look what he has done to me! To me!
The king on whom his kingliness depends!
I will not fight for him.
Hearing your steps, I thought: at last,
My friends have come to visit me.
They took their time about it, true—
After he took my she none of you came—
Now, though—admittedly they are in trouble,
Serious trouble—they have arrived as friends,
And of their own accord.
But you have not come here as friends.
And you have not come of your own accord.
You came because your King told you to come.
You came because I am his last resort.
And, incidentally, your last resort.
35
At least he offers stuff.
All you have offered is advice:
‘Keep your temper . . .
Mind your tongue . . .
Think what the world will say . . .’
No mention of your King’s treatment of me.
No sign of love for me behind your tears.
I will not fight for him.
I can remember very well indeed
The day you two grand lords came visiting my father’s house,
How I ran out to you, and took your hands—
The greatest men that I had ever seen:
Ajax, my fighting cousin, strong, brave, unafraid to die;
Nestor, the King of Sandy Pylos, wisdom’s sword.
And then, when all had had enough to eat and drink
And it was sealed that I should come to Troy,
Then my dear father said that lordship knows
Not only how to fight, and when to hold its tongue,
But of the difference between a child enraged
And honour bound lords.
I will not fight for him.
There is a King to be maintained. You are his lords.
My fighting powers prove my inferiority.
Whatever he, through you, may grant,
I must receive it as a favour, not of right,
Go back to him with downcast looks, a suppliant tone,
Acknowledge my transgressions—I did not
Applaud his sticky fingers on my she’s meek flesh.
My mother says I have a choice:
Live as a happy backwood king for aye
Or give the world an everlasting murmur of my name,
And die.
Be up tomorrow sharp
To see me sacrifice to Lord Poseidon and set sail.
Oh, yes, his gifts:
‘The greatest benefaction ever known.’
If he put Heaven in my hand I would not want it.
His offers magnify himself.
Likewise his child.
I do not want to trash the girl.
She is like me. Bad luck to have poor friends.
Bad luck to have his Kingship as your sire.
36
My father will select my wife.
Each spring a dozen local kings drive up
And lead their daughters naked round our yard.
Some decent local girl. My father’s worth
Is all the wealth we will require.
You Greeks will not take Troy.
You have disintegrated as a fighting force.
Troy is your cemetery. Blame your King.
The man who you say has done all he can.
The man who has admitted he was wrong.
But he has not done all he can.
And he has not admitted he was wrong.
Or not to me.
I want him here, your King.
His arms straight down his sides, his shoulders back,
Announcing loud and clear that he was wrong to take my she.
Apologising for that wrong, to me, the son of Péleus.
Before my followers, with you, Pylos and Salamis,
Crete. Sparta. Tyrins, Argos, Calydon, the Islands, here,
Stood to attention on either side of him.
That is my offer. Take it, or die.
Nestor may stay the night.
You, dear cousin Ajax, tell your King what I have said.
Preferably, in front of everyone.”
Who said,
As my Achilles lifted his guitar:
“Lord, I was never so bethumped with words
Since first I called my father Dad.”
The sea.
Their feet along the sand to Agamemnon’s gate.
And in starlit air
The Trojans singing:
“I love my wife, I love her dearly,
I love the hole she pisses through,
37
I love her lily-white tits
And her nut-brown arsehole,
I could eat her shit with a wooden spoon.”
~ Christopher Logue,

IN CHAPTERS [89/89]



   26 Integral Yoga
   15 Christianity
   10 Science
   5 Psychology
   5 Poetry
   5 Fiction
   4 Occultism
   3 Philosophy
   1 Integral Theory
   1 Baha i Faith
   1 Alchemy


   19 Sri Aurobindo
   17 The Mother
   12 Satprem
   12 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   6 Carl Jung
   5 H P Lovecraft
   4 Jorge Luis Borges
   2 Walt Whitman
   2 Saint Augustine of Hippo


   7 The Future of Man
   5 The Secret Doctrine
   5 Lovecraft - Poems
   4 Agenda Vol 06
   3 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   3 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   3 Letters On Yoga I
   3 Let Me Explain
   3 Agenda Vol 02
   3 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
   2 Whitman - Poems
   2 The Life Divine
   2 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   2 City of God
   2 Borges - Poems


0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  made progress. The progress is undeniable even though it may
  not be apparent. Certainly the path of yoga is a very difficult

0 1961-03-14, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Generally speaking, the progress is undeniable, but the physical body has a terrible need of rest. Its annoying, for it prevents me from working.
   How to explain it? Its rather strange: the cells attitude and their state of consciousness is changing with extraordinary rapidity; yet from the ordinary viewpoint of health, there is no corresponding progress, quite the contrary. One could say things arent going too well, but I see clearly that its not true. I see that it isnt true, its only an appearance but reconciling the two is difficult.

0 1961-06-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It is the undeniable fact of the (oh, how to put it!) the constant Presence but Presence means nothing (Mother remains silent for a long time, then gives up trying to explain).
   Oh, the more you try to capture it, the more it slips out of your grasp!

0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Well, in that respect, it is absolutely undeniable that my body has an infinitely greater capacity than Sri Aurobindos had.
   That was the basic problembecause the identification of the two [Sri Aurobindo and Mother] was almost childs play, it was nothing: for me to merge into him or him to merge into me was no problem, it wasnt difficult. We had some conversations on precisely this subject, because we saw that (there were many other things, too, but this isnt the time to speak of them) the prevailing conditions were such that I told him I would leave this body and melt into him with no regret or difficulty; I told him this in words, not just in thought. And he also replied to me in words: Your body is indispensable for the Work. Without your body the Work cannot be done. After that, I said no more. It was no longer my concern, and that was the end of it.

0 1962-02-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   With a universal mental vision, you can see (and this is very interesting) how the mental world operates to get realized on the physical plane. You see the various mental formations, how they converge, conflict, combine and relate to one another, which ones get the upper hand, exert a stronger influence and achieve a more total realization. Now, if you really want a higher vision, you must get out of the mental world and see the original wills as they descend to take expression. In this case, you may not have all the details, but the central FACT, the fact in its central truth, is indisputable, undeniable, absolutely correct.
   Some people also have the faculty of predicting things already existing on earth but at a distance, far from physical eyestheyre generally those who have the capacity to expand and extend their consciousness. Their vision is slightly more subtle than physical vision, and depends on an organ subtler than its purely material counterpart (what could be called the life of this organ). So, by projecting their consciousness, and having the will to see, they can clearly see things that already exist but are beyond our ordinary field of vision. Those who have this capacitysincere people who tell what they see, not blufferssee with perfect precision and exactness.

0 1964-11-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But its double: there is Inertia on one hand, and on the other vital perversion the NERVOUS perversion of the vital world, of the vital influence. There isnt just Inertia: there is a sort of perverted ill will. You can easily (relatively easily) drive it out and eliminate it entirely from conscious mental and vital life; that work, which in the past was considered as, oh, a tremendously difficult thingchanging an individuals natureis relatively easy; all in the nature that depends on the vital or the mind is relatively easy to change, very easy. I am not saying very easy for the ordinary man, but very easy in comparison with the work in Matter, in the cells of the body. Because, as I told you last time, their goodwill is undeniable and their thrust towards the Divine has become absolutely spontaneous: all that is conscious is luminous but the trouble is all that isnt yet conscious! Its the mass of all that isnt yet conscious and is, then, tossed between two influences, one as odious as the other: the influence of Inertia (gesture of dazed sluggishness), of the MASS that stops you from moving forward, and the influence of vital perversion and ill willits this influence that makes everything crooked, that distorts everything.
   And it has become very subtle, very hidden, difficult to ferret out. When almost everything was like that, it was visible, it was conspicuous; but that state changed very fast: the difficulty is whats hidden underneath and isnt voluminous enough to draw attention to itself. And, oh, those habits, those habits. For instance (magnifying it to make it more easily visible), the habit of foreseeing catastrophes.

0 1965-05-19, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   This is undeniable.
   And because of this incapacity, there is a sort of futility in wanting absolutely to reduce the problem to what human comprehension can understand of it. In that case, its very wise to say, as Thon used to, We are here, we have a work to do, and whats necessary is to do it as best we can, without worrying about the why and the how. Why is the world as it is? When we are able to understand why, well understand.

0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   When Satprem asked Mother whether this "something" was indeed the supramental Force, Mother answered this: "I'd rather not name it, because they will make a dogma out of it. It [this "something"] is what happened when what we called 'the first supramental manifestation' took place in 1956. I tried my best to prevent it from being turned into a dogma. But if I say, 'On such-and-such date, such-and-such a thing took place,' it will be printed in big characters, and if someone says something else, he will be told, 'You are a heretic.' So I don't want that. But it's undeniable that the atmosphere has changed, there is something new in the atmospherewe can call it 'the descent of the supramental Truth' because for us these words have a meaning, but I don't want to make a declaration about it, because I don't want it to be THE classic or 'true' way to describe the event. That's why I keep it vague, deliberately."
   "After all India with her mentality and method has done a hundred times more in the spiritual field than Europe with her intellectual doubts and questionings. Even when a European overcomes the doubt and questioning, he does not find it as easy to go as fast and far as an Indian with the same force of personality because the stir of mind is still greater. It is only when he can get beyond that that he arrives, but for him it is not so easy.

0 1965-09-15a, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It seems, according to astrologers, that the combination of stars for the month of September is very bad for the earth. Naturally, this is always something to be cautious about, because it depends on peoples intuition, on their capacity to interpret, whether their vision is broad enough and so on, but it seems that all the signs are undeniable and indicate that things are bad (thats vague, of course), catastrophic. I was told this before, they said it in July. Only, I never attach too much importance to their conclusions, because they are always And also, they say some very vague things that contradict each other. Personally, I dont know the first thing about all that, I am not trying to seein fact I NEVER try to see (what came last night came very spontaneously, without my trying to see). The work, of course, is devoid of thought, of verbal expression, and constant; but it has been constant for a long time: the first time was at the beginning of the year, I think, at least six months ago. The second time, I told you I had one night an experience [the pressure of the Supreme] before anything really serious had taken place. Well, the first experience I had, of the consciousness hurling a fantastic power on the earth, which was necessarily going to shake things up, was at least six months before that second experience. And for those six months, it was constant: as soon as I came into contact with the earth consciousness, it was there, and constant, constant. Then came that indication: the pressure of the supreme Lord. And the third step was yesterday evening.
   Well see.

0 1965-09-15b, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I do not think I have said anything this morning that could contradict this undeniable fact.
   Signed: Mother

0 1966-10-08, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   To me its even stronger than that: when I look at a rose like the one I gave you, this thing which holds such a concentration of spontaneous beauty (not fabricated: a spontaneous beauty, a blossoming), you only have to see that and youre sure the Divine exists, its a certitude. You cant disbelieve, its impossible. Its like those peopleits fantastic!those people who have studied Nature, studied really in depth how everything works and occurs and exists: how can they study sincerely, carefully and painstakingly without being absolutely convinced that the Divine is there? We call it the Divine the Divine is quite tiny! (Mother laughs) To me, the existence is undeniable proof that there is nothing but THAT something we cannot name, cannot define, cannot describe, but which we can feel and BECOME more and more. A something which is more perfect than all perfections, more beautiful than all beauties, more wonderful than all wonders, which even a totality of all that is cannot expressand only THAT exists. And its not a something floating in nothingness: there is nothing but That.
   By the Body of the Earth or the Sannyasin. Satprem complained of difficulty in writing the end of his book.

0 1967-05-20, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   You see, an undeniable goodwill, a will to do the right thing (Mother is speaking about herself), an attitude that seemed as good as possible, and already the sense of a surrender and an effort to express not at all personal movements, but the guiding Willall that, that whole attitude (which at the time seemed quite good), seen with todays consciousness! (Mother takes her head in her hands) So its easy to think that
   Sri Aurobindo surely had that consciousness, surely since he spoke about i the had it, and he saw us living like that around him what patience! What a marvel of patience.

0 1968-10-26, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It wouldnt be general, it could only be partial. But it WILL be. Its part of the Plan. But the perfection of ONE realization depends on a total realization. There may be a certain quantum of realization, thats undeniable thats precisely what the supramental race will realize, obviously. Its obvious.
   But I mean that if, now, through some miracle, ONE became luminously true, it would strike the rest of mankind so much that it would be turned back onto the path of TruthONE example.

1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  it has inherited undeniable elements of oriental thought,
  especially Indian. It should once more be remembered that

1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  This is undeniable and we shall not discuss it further. But is it still
  moving? Here we have the real question, the living, burning ques-
  --
  The plasticity of Nature in the past is an undeniable fact; its
  present rigidity is less capable of scientific proof. If we had to

1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  Be that as it may, and ignoring the sterile aspects of con- troversy, the public appearance of the Zohar was the great landmark in the development of the Qabalah, and we to-day are able to divide its history into two main periods, pre- and post-Zoharic. While it is undeniable that there were
  Jewish prophetic and mystical Schools of great proficiency and possessing much recondite knowledge in Biblical times, such as that of Samuel, the Essenes, and Philo, yet the first

1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  But it is undeniable that, thanks to their accumulated efforts, we
  have a better understanding than they could possess of the dimen-

1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  There are several proofs of this, the simplest of which is perhaps as follows, showing that the most obvious statement cannot bear analysis. . A simple question is : ." .What is vermilion ?" That" vermilion is red " is undeniable, no doubt, but quite meaningless nevertheless; for each of the two terms must be defined by means of at least two others of which the same is true.
  So simple an enquiry, too, as "Why is sugar sweet? " involves a vast multitude of very highly complicated chemical researches, each one of which eventually leads to that blindest of all blank walls-what is matter ?-what the perceiving mind ?

1.02 - The Vision of the Past, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  to be clearly understood. While accepting the undeniable
  fact of a general transformation of Life in the course of time,

1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  It is undeniable that, viewed in a certain light, a Universe of
  divergent or pluralistic structure seems to be capable of giving rise

1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  other a persistent, incredible but undeniable rise towards the
  smallest numbers by way of improbability. The movements

1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  clearly understood. While accepting the undeniable fact of the
  general evolution of Life in the course of time, many biologists still

1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  Atlantic points similarly to the undeniable fact that, for a great many
  people, the need for self-assertion arising from a sense of inferiority is a

1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The characteristics of Varuna in the Veda have given pause even to its naturalistic interpreters and compelled them to admit the presence of moral ideas and a subjective element in the Rishis conception of their divinities. They admit it grudgingly and attempt to give it as crude and primitive an appearance as possible, but the moral & supernatural functions of Varuna are undeniable. Yet Varuna is the Greek Ouranos, which is simply & plainly the sky, Akasha. Ouranos in Greek myth is a colourless presence, parent by his union with Earth, Akasha with Prithivi, of all beings but especially of Kronos & the Titans, the elder gods, the first masters of heaven. There is no resemblance here to Varuna. Farther to complicate the task of the modern mythologists, Varuna in later Sanscrit has fallen from his skies & become the god of the Ocean. By what extraordinary chemical process of the imagination was the god of the sky converted into the god of the Ocean? Because both are blue, one is driven to suppose! That would be material enough and crude enough to satisfy the firmest believer in the intellectual crudity & semi-savagery of the Vedic Rishis. But let us leave aside the shadowy Greek Ouranos and look a little from our own standpoint at this mighty Vedic Varuna.
  We get our first mention of Varuna at the end of the second hymn in the Rigveda, the hymn of Madhuchchhandas in which he calls, as in the third, on several gods, first to Vayu, then to Vayu and Indra together, last, Varuna and Mitra. Arrive, he says, O Vayu, O beautiful one, lo these Soma-powers in their array (is it not a battle-array?), protect them, hear their call! O Vayu, strongly thy lovers woo thee with prayers (or, desires), they have distilled the nectar, they have found their strength (or, they know the day?). O Vayu, thy abounding stream moves for the giver, it is wide for the drinking of the Soma-juice. O Indra & Vayu, here are the outpourings, come to them with outputtings of strength, the powers of delight desire you both. Thou, O Vayu, awake, and Indra, to the outpourings of the Soma, you who are rich in power of your plenty; so (that is, rich in power) come to me, for the foe has attacked. Come O Vayu, and Indra, to the distiller of the nectar, expel the foe, swiftly hither strong by the understanding. And then comes the closing call to Mitra & Varuna. I call Mitra of purified discernment and Varuna who destroys the foe, they who effect a bright and gracious understanding. By Law of Truth, Mitra and Varuna, who by the Truth increase and to the Truth attain, enjoy a mighty strength. Mitra and Varuna, the seers, born in Force, dwellers in the Vast, uphold Daksha (the discerning intelligence) at his work.

1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  The projection-making factor, for instance, has undeniable
  reality. Anyone who insists on denying it becomes identical with

1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
  benet us or them. Separation is denite, and trying to resist the undeniable
  is futile. So instead of clinging to dear ones, we let go of our attachment and

1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  symptom, just as medicine did. Despite its undeniable youthfulness as a
  scientifically avowable method, it is yet as old as the healing art itself and,

1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  The student of ancient religions, too, will note with great interest in this connection the undeniable fact that the great teachers or Adepts (those who attained to Tipharas, at least, the Sephirah of ; see next chapter) who have left their impress on popular worship - Attis, Adonis,
  Osiris, Mithra, Dionysius, and Jesus Christ - have become, almost without exception, identified with the cycle of the

1.1.01 - The Divine and Its Aspects, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
      I know what is your difficulty about the Cosmic Divine. It was not present to my mind because I look at these things from the point of view of facts as they are both to our spiritual and our outward experience - whereas the point of view on which you lay stress is that they are not what they ought to be or what the mind, ethical feeling and the vital in man feel that they ought to be. That this world is full of queer, ugly and inharmonious things is the very plain and self-evident fact with which we have to start, - wherever we may want or hope to arrive. But the whole question is there, whether there is something behind, something that warrants this hope to arrive at something better. For the spiritual experience there is - and this something behind is to it as undeniable a fact as the very apparent character of this world in its surface aspect as a world of Ignorance, tribulation, suffering, disharmony, disorder, obscure Inconscience. To spiritual experience it is not a speculation but a fact that there is a Godhead immanent within behind this flawed and imperfect human nature into some likeness to which this nature can try to grow; there is something behind the cosmic movement with all its disorder which is of the nature of abiding peace, calm, strength, joy and all-embracing universality and to enter into it and abide in it is possible for our consciousness also. It is also a part of spiritual experience that there is something Beyond in which this Divinity - or whatever other name you may give to it - is above the contradiction offered to it by this world of disorder and ignorance; that is the meaning of the Transcendence. Whatever wide differences there may be between different ways of spiritual experience or whatever names may be put on these things, so much is fairly universal. If there were not these certitudes, there could be no assured spiritual life or endeavour.
      *

1.1.02 - Sachchidananda, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is fundamentally true for most people that the pleasure of life, of existence in itself, predominates over the troubles of life; otherwise most people would want to die whereas the fact is that everybody wants to live - and if you proposed to them an easy means of eternal extinction they would decline without thanks. That is what X is saying and it is undeniable. It is also true that this comes from the Ananda of existence which is behind everything and is reflected in the instinctive pleasure of existence. Naturally, this instinctive essential pleasure is not the
  Ananda, - it is only a pale and dim reflection of it in an inferior life-consciousness - but it is enough for its purpose. I have said that myself somewhere and I do not see anything absurd or excessive in the statement.

1.10 - Aesthetic and Ethical Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  We get then by elimination to a positive idea and definition of culture. But still on this higher plane of the mental life we are apt to be pursued by old exclusivenesses and misunderstandings. We see that in the past there seems often to have been a quarrel between culture and conduct; yet according to our definition conduct also is a part of the cultured life and the ethical ideality one of the master impulses of the cultured being. The opposition which puts on one side the pursuit of ideas and knowledge and beauty and calls that culture and on the other the pursuit of character and conduct and exalts that as the moral life must start evidently from an imperfect view of human possibility and perfection. Yet that opposition has not only existed, but is a naturally strong tendency of the human mind and therefore must answer to some real and important divergence in the very composite elements of our being. It is the opposition which Arnold drew between Hebraism and Hellenism. The trend of the Jewish nation which gave us the severe ethical religion of the Old Testament,crude, conventional and barbarous enough in the Mosaic law, but rising to undeniable heights of moral exaltation when to the Law were added the Prophets, and finally exceeding itself and blossoming into a fine flower of spirituality in Judaic Christianity,1was dominated by the preoccupation of a terrestrial and ethical righteousness and the promised rewards of right worship and right doing, but innocent of science and philosophy, careless of knowledge, indifferent to beauty. The Hellenic mind was less exclusively but still largely dominated by a love of the play of reason for its own sake, but even more powerfully by a high sense of beauty, a clear aesthetic sensibility and a worship of the beautiful in every activity, in every creation, in thought, in art, in life, in religion. So strong was this sense that not only manners, but ethics were seen by it to a very remarkable extent in the light of its master idea of beauty; the good was to its instinct largely the becoming and the beautiful. In philosophy itself it succeeded in arriving at the conception of the Divine as Beauty, a truth which the metaphysician very readily misses and impoverishes his thought by missing it. But still, striking as is this great historical contrast and powerful as were its results on European culture, we have to go beyond its outward manifestation if we would understand in its source this psychological opposition.
  The conflict arises from that sort of triangular disposition of the higher or more subtle mentality which we have already had occasion to indicate. There is in our mentality a side of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,which creates the artistic and aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual distrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty; he is naturally hedonistic,for beauty and delight are inseparable powers, and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human impulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature,just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration,we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in his extremesand a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their fullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may understand the whole range of its capacities.

1.10 - On our Knowledge of Universals, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
  'All products of two integers, which never have been and never will be thought of by any human being, are over 100.' Here is a general proposition of which the truth is undeniable, and yet, from the very nature of the case, we can never give an instance; because any two numbers we may think of are excluded by the terms of the proposition.
  This possibility, of knowledge of general propositions of which no instance can be given, is often denied, because it is not perceived that the knowledge of such propositions only requires a knowledge of the relations of universals, and does not require any knowledge of instances of the universals in question. Yet the knowledge of such general propositions is quite vital to a great deal of what is generally admitted to be known. For example, we saw, in our early chapters, that knowledge of physical objects, as opposed to sense-data, is only obtained by an inference, and that they are not things with which we are acquainted. Hence we can never know any proposition of the form 'this is a physical object', where 'this' is something immediately known. It follows that all our knowledge concerning physical objects is such that no actual instance can be given. We can give instances of the associated sense-data, but we cannot give instances of the actual physical objects.

1.11 - FAITH IN MAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  things are undeniable: first, that at certain moments in the past, hu-
  man consciousness however unchanging in its essential frame-

1.16 - THE ESSENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  much more felt than understood. But does not their undeniable, if
  vague, attraction take on a clearer aspect if we consider them, as I

1.19 - ON THE PROBABLE EXISTENCE AHEAD OF US OF AN ULTRA-HUMAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  proaches nearer to ourselves, the fact is surely undeniable more-
  ON THE PROBABLE EXISTENCE AHEAD 273

1.63 - The Interpretation of the Fire-Festivals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  use of fire as a charm to produce sunshine appears to be undeniable,
  nevertheless in attempting to explain popular customs we should

1.74 - Obstacles on the Path, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  This story was told me by an enemy, who thought quite seriously that he would go to Hell for being "Open." ("Open" Brethren were lax about the Lord's Supper, let people partake who were not sound upon the Ramsgate Question; and other Theological Atrocities!) It meant that the facts were so undeniable that the "advertisement for Answer to Prayer" outweighed the "miracle by a heretic."
  I knew a poetess of great distinction who used to amuse herself by breaking off a conversation and saying, "Give me a franc" (or a shilling, or any small sum) and then going on with her previous remarks. She told me that of over a hundred people I was the second who had passed the coin to her without remark of any kind.

1955-10-26 - The Divine and the universal Teacher - The power of the Word - The Creative Word, the mantra - Sound, music in other worlds - The domains of pure form, colour and ideas, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  In Indian mythology the creator God is Brahma, and I think that it was precisely his power which has been symbolised by this flower, The Creative Word. And when one is in contact with it, the words spoken have a power of evocation or creation or formation or transformation; the words sound always has a power; it has much more power than men think. It may be a good power and it may be a bad power. It creates vibrations which have an undeniable effect. It is not so much the idea as the sound; the idea too has its own power, but in its own domainwhereas the sound has a power in the material world.
  I think I have explained this to you once; I told you, for example, that words spoken casually, usually without any reflection and without attaching any importance to them, can be used to do something very good. I think I spoke to you about Bonjour, Good Day, didnt I? When people meet and say Bonjour, they do so mechanically and without thinking. But if you put a will into it, an aspiration to indeed wish someone a good day, well, there is a way of saying Good Day which is very effective, much more effective than if simply meeting someone you thought: Ah! I hope he has a good day, without saying anything. If with this hope in your thought you say to him in a certain way, Good Day, you make it more concrete and more effective.

1956-01-04 - Integral idea of the Divine - All things attracted by the Divine - Bad things not in place - Integral yoga - Moving idea-force, ideas - Consequences of manifestation - Work of Spirit via Nature - Change consciousness, change world, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  But, from the moral point of view, if you have given all that you have, you have done the utmost you could have done, nothing more can be asked of you; you understand, from the moral point of view, from the pure spiritual point of view, not from the point of view of realisation. From the purely spiritual point of view the gift of your three rupees has exactly the same value as the gift of fifty. And even he who gave fifty rupees, if he has kept back one, his gift is less integral and pure than yours of only three. So, it is not on that plane that the thing must be seen. But from the point of view of the material realisation it is undeniable that fifty is more than three, for all those who know mathematics!
  (Silence)

1957-12-18 - Modern science and illusion - Value of experience, its transforming power - Supramental power, first aspect to manifest, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  In fact, the value of an experience or a discovery could perhaps be proved by the power it gives, the power to change these appearances and transform things, circumstances and the world as it appears to us, in accordance with the will that manifests through that experience. It seems to me that the most universal proof of the validity of an individual or collective experience would be its power to make things these appearances that we call the worlddifferent from what they are. From the subjective point of view, the effect of the experience on an individual consciousness is an undeniable proof; for one who attains bliss, sovereign peace, unchanging delight, the profound knowledge of things, it is more than proved. The effects on the outer form depend on many other things besides the experience itselfdepend perhaps on the first cause of these experiences but out of all this, one thing seems to be a proof which is accessible to other people as well as to the one who has the experience; it is the power over other people and thingswhich for the ordinary consciousness is objective. For instance, if a person who has attained the state of consciousness I am speaking about, had the power of communicating it to others, it would be partiallyonly partiallya proof of the reality of his experiences; but further, if the state of consciousness in which he is for instance, a state of perfect harmonycould create this harmony in the outer world, in what apparently is not harmony, it would be, I think, the proof most readily accepted, even by the materialist scientific mind. If these illusory appearances could be changed into something more beautiful, more harmonious, happier than the world we live in now, this would perhaps be an undeniable proof. And if we take it a little farther, if, as Sri Aurobindo promises us, the supramental force, consciousness and light transform this world and create a new race, then, just as the apes and animalsif they could speakcould not deny the existence of man, so too man would not be able to deny the existence of these new beingsprovided that they are different enough from the human race for this difference to be perceptible even to the deceptive organs of man.
  From these deductions it would seem that the most conclusive and obvious aspect and the one which will probably be the first to manifestprobablywill be the aspect of Power, rather than the aspect of Joy or of Truth. For a new race to be founded on earth, it would necessarily have to be protected from other earthly elements in order to be able to survive; and power is protectionnot an artificial power, external and false, but the true strength, the triumphant Will. It is therefore not impossible to think that the supramental action, even before being an action of harmonisation, illumination, joy and beauty, might be an action of power, to serve as a protection. Naturally, for this action of power to be truly effective, it would have to be founded on Knowledge and Truth and Love and Harmony; but these things could manifest, visibly, little by little, when the ground, so to say, has been prepared by the action of a sovereign Will and Power.

1962 02 27, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   If you have a universal mental vision, you can see all mental formations. Then you seeand it is very interestinghow the mental world is organised to realise itself on the physical plane. You see the various formations, the way in which they approach and fight each other, combine together and organise themselves, the ones that prevail and gain influence and achieve a more complete realisation. Now if you really want to have a higher vision, you must rise above the mental world and see the original wills as they descend to express themselves. In this case, you may not possess all the details, but the central fact, the fact in its central truth, is indisputable, undeniable, absolutely correct.
   Some people also have the power to predict things which already exist on earth, but at a distance, at a great distance, very far from the physical eyes. These are usually people who are capable of widening and extending their consciousness. They have a physical, but slightly more subtle vision, which depends on an organ that is more subtle than the purely material onewhat might be called the life of this organ and so, by projecting their consciousness with a will to see, they can see very well, they can see things: these things already exist, only they are not within the field of our ordinary vision. People who have this capacity and who tell what they see, who are sincere and who are not bluffers, see in a way that is absolutely precise and exact.

1f.lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable
   significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my

1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable
   that the winter of 191920 saw a great change in Ward; whereby he
  --
   Ward, but the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise
   despite a mysterious tension of the utmost gravity. The interview was

1f.lovecraft - The Dreams in the Witch House, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
  else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the
  prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the

1f.lovecraft - The Last Test, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   actual cases and the undeniable spread of typhoid in the unsanitary
   suburban tent colonies. The leaders and editors of the community

1f.lovecraft - The Shadow out of Time, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave
   of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.

1.jlb - Plainness, #Borges - Poems, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
  as part of an undeniable Reality,
  like stones of the road, like trees.

1.jlb - Simplicity, #Borges - Poems, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
  as part of an undeniable Reality,
  like stones and trees.

1.poe - Eureka - A Prose Poem, #Poe - Poems, #unset, #Zen
  "Nor had our forefathers any better right to talk about certainty, when pursuing, in blind confidence, the a priori path of axioms, or of the Ram. At innumerable points this path was scarcely as straight as a ram's-horn. The simple truth is, that the Aristotelians erected their castles upon a basis far less reliable than air; for no such things as axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all. This they must have been very blind, indeed, not to see, or at least to suspect; for, even in their own day, many of their long-admitted 'axioms' had been abandoned: -'ex nihilo nihil fit,' for example, and a 'thing cannot act where it is not,' and 'there cannot be antipodes,' and 'darkness cannot proceed from light.' These and numerous similar propositions formerly accepted, without hesitation, as axioms, or undeniable truths, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be altogether untenable: -how absurd in these people, then, to persist in relying upon a basis, as immutable, whose mutability had become so repeatedly manifest!
  "But, even through evidence afforded by themselves against themselves, it is easy to convict these a priori reasoners of the grossest unreason -it is easy to show the futility -the impalpability of their axioms in general. I have now lying before me" it will be observed that we still proceed with the letter -"I have now lying before me a book printed about a thousand years ago. Pundit assures me that it is decidedly the cleverest ancient work on its topic, which is 'Logic.' The author, who was much esteemed in his day, was one Miller or Mill; and we find it recorded of him, as a point of some importance, that he rode a mill-horse whom he called Jeremy Bentham: -but let us glance at the volume itself!
  "Ah! -'Ability or inability to conceive,' says Mr. Mill very properly, 'is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth.' Now, that this is a palpable truism no one in his senses will deny. Not to admit the proposition, is to insinuate a charge of variability in Truth itself, whose very title is a synonym of the Steadfast. If ability to conceive be taken as a criterion of Truth, then a truth to David Hume would very seldom be a truth to Joe; and ninety-nine hundredths of what is undeniable in Heaven would be demonstrable falsity upon Earth. The proposition of Mr. Mill, then, is sustained. I will not grant it to be an axiom; and this merely because I am showing that no axioms exist; but, with a distinction which could not have been cavilled at even by Mr. Mill himself, I am ready to grant that, if an axiom there be, then the proposition of which we speak has the fullest right to be considered an axiom -that no more absolute axiom is -and, consequently, that any subsequent proposition which shall conflict with this one primarily advanced, must be either a falsity in itself -that is to say no axiom -or, if admitted axiomatic, must at once neutralize both itself and its predecessor.
  "And now, by the logic of their own propounder, let us proceed to test any one of the axioms propounded. Let us give Mr. Mill the fairest of play. We will bring the point to no ordinary issue. We will select for investigation no common-place axiom -no axiom of what, not the less preposterously because only impliedly, he terms his secondary class -as if a positive truth by definition could be either more or less positively a truth: -we will select, I say, no axiom of an unquestionability so questionable as is to be found in Euclid. We will not talk, for example, about such propositions as that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, or that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. We will afford the logician every advantage. We will come at once to a proposition which he regards as the acme of the unquestionable -as the quintessence of axiomatic undeniability. Here it is: -'Contradictions cannot both be true that is, cannot coexist in nature.' Here Mr. Mill means, for instance, -and I give the most forcible instance conceivable -that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree -that it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree: -all which is quite reasonable of itself and will answer remarkably well as an axiom, until we bring it into collation with an axiom insisted upon a few pages before -in other words -words which I have previously employed -until we test it by the logic of its own propounder. 'A tree,' Mr. Mill asserts, 'must be either a tree or not a tree.' Very well: -and now let me ask him, why. To this little query there is but one response: -I defy any man living to invent a second. The sole answer is this: 'Because we find it impossible to conceive that a tree can be anything else than a tree or not a tree.' This, I repeat, is Mr. Mill's sole answer: -he will not pretend to suggest another: -and yet, by his own showing, his answer is clearly no answer at all; for has he not already required us to admit, as an axiom, that ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth? Thus all -absolutely his argumentation is at sea without a rudder. Let it not be urged that an exception from the general rule is to be made, in cases where the 'impossibility to conceive' is so peculiarly great as when we are called upon to conceive a tree both a tree and not a tree. Let no attempt, I say, be made at urging this sotticism; for, in the first place, there are no degrees of 'impossibility,' and thus no one impossible conception can be more peculiarly impossible than another impossible conception: -in the second place, Mr. Mill himself, no doubt after thorough deliberation, has most distinctly, and most rationally, excluded all opportunity for exception, by the emphasis of his proposition, that, in no case, is ability or inability to conceive, to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth: -in the third place, even were exceptions admissible at all, it remains to be shown how any exception is admissible here. That a tree can be both a tree and not a tree, is an idea which the angels, or the devils, may entertain, and which no doubt many an earthly Bedlamite, or Transcendentalist, does.
  --
  Since all this is undeniable: since the choice of the mind is to be made between impossibilities of conception: since one impossibility cannot be greater than another: and since, thus, one cannot be preferred to another: the philosophers who not only maintain, on the grounds mentioned, man's idea of infinity but, on account of such supposititious idea, infinity itself -are plainly engaged in demonstrating one impossible thing to be possible by showing how it is that some one other thing -is impossible too. This, it will be said, is nonsense; and perhaps it is: -indeed I think it very capital nonsense -but forego all claim to it as nonsense of mine.
  The readiest mode, however, of displaying the fallacy of the philosophical argument on this question, is by simply adverting to a fact respecting it which has been hitherto quite overlooked -the fact that the argument alluded to both proves and disproves its own proposition. "The mind is impelled," say the theologians and others, "to admit a First Cause, by the superior difficulty it experiences in conceiving cause beyond cause without end." The quibble, as before, lies in the word "difficulty" -but here what is it employed to sustain? A First Cause. And what is a First Cause? An ultimate termination of causes. And what is an ultimate termination of causes? Finity -the Finite. Thus the one quibble, in two processes, by God knows how many philosophers, is made to support now Finity and now Infinity -could it not be brought to support something besides? As for the quibblers -they, at least, are insupportable. But -to dismiss them: -what they prove in the one case is the identical nothing which they demonstrate in the other.

1.whitman - I Sing The Body Electric, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
  It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!
  I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor

1.whitman - Song Of The Open Road, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
  Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
      would hold me.

2.03 - DEMETER, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  times regard ' a mere question of size ', it is undeniable that
  certain qualities, by the very fact that they are linked to a material

2.03 - The Christian Phenomenon and Faith in the Incarnation, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  an undeniable fact, explain it how you will, that the most
  ardent collective focus of love that has yet appeared in the

2.03 - THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  [97] Unfortunately I was unable to get hold of the original treatise of Gevartius. But there is a later author, Caietanus Felix Veranius, who takes up the Eros theory apparently as his own discovery in his book, Pantheon argenteae Elocutionis.254 He mentions a number of earlier commentators, amongst whom Gevartius is conspicuously absent. As Gevartius is named in the earlier lists, it is scarcely likely that Veranius was unacquainted with him. The suspicion of plagiarism is almost unescapable. Veranius defends his thesis with a good deal of skill, though considering the undeniable paradoxicality of Eros the task he sets himself is not too difficult. I will mention only one of his arguments, concerning the end of the inscription. The inscription ends, he says, with scit et nescit quid cui posuerit, because though the author of this enigmatic inscription knows that he has dedicated it to Love, he does not know what Love really is, since it is expressed by so many contradictions and riddles. Therefore he knows and does not know know to whom he dedicated it.
  [98] I mention the interpretation of Veranius mainly because it is the forerunner of a theory which was very popular at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, namely Freuds sexual theory of the unconscious. Veranius even goes so far as to conjecture that Aelia Laelia had a special talent for eroticism (therein anticipating Aldrovandus). He says: Laelia was a whore; Crispis comes from curly-haired, because curly-haired people are frailer than others and more prone to the allurements of Love. Here he quotes Martial: Whos that curly-headed fellow whos always running round with your wife, Marianus? Who is that curly-headed fellow?255

2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   political and social gospels, the illusion of his ethical efforts at perfection, the illusion of philanthropy and service, the illusion of works, the illusion of fame, power, success, the illusion of all achievement. Human social and political endeavour turns always in a circle and leads nowhere; man's life and nature remain always the same, always imperfect, and neither laws nor institutions nor education nor philosophy nor morality nor religious teachings have succeeded in producing the perfect man, still less a perfect humanity, - straighten the tail of the dog as you will, it has been said, it always resumes its natural curve of crookedness. Altruism, philanthropy and service, Christian love or Buddhist compassion have not made the world a whit happier, they only give infinitesimal bits of momentary relief here and there, throw drops on the fire of the world's suffering. All aims are in the end transitory and futile, all achievements unsatisfying or evanescent; all works are so much labour of effort and success and failure which consummate nothing definitive: whatever changes are made in human life are of the form only and these forms pursue each other in a futile circle; for the essence of life, its general character remains the same for ever. This view of things may be exaggerated, but it has an undeniable force; it is supported by the experience of man's centuries and it carries in itself a significance which at one time or another comes upon the mind with an overwhelming air of self-evidence. Not only so, but if it is true that the fundamental laws and values of terrestrial existence are fixed or that it must always turn in repeated cycles,
  - and this has been for long a very prevalent notion, - then this view of things in the end is hardly escapable. For imperfection, ignorance, frustration and suffering are a dominant factor of the existing world-order, the elements contrary to them, knowledge, happiness, success, perfection are constantly found to be deceptive or inconclusive: the two opposites are so inextricably mixed that, if this state of things is not a motion towards a greater fulfilment, if this is the permanent character of the world-order, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that all here is either the creation of an inconscient Energy, which would account for the incapacity of an apparent consciousness to arrive at anything, or

2.07 - The Knowledge and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   higher depths of consciousness and unite them in the one omnipresent Reality. If we take the facts of our and the world's being, we find existence to be one always, - a unity governs even its utmost multiplicity; but the multiplicity is also on the face of things undeniable. We have found unity pursuing us everywhere: even, when we go below the surface, we find that there is no binding dualism; the contradictories and oppositions which the intellect creates exist only as aspects of the original
  Truth; oneness and multiplicity are poles of the same Reality; the dualities that trouble our consciousness are contrasted truths of one and the same Truth of being. All multiplicity resolves itself into a manifoldness of the one Being, the one Consciousness of

2.1.1.04 - Reading, Yogic Force and the Development of Style, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Methinks you are making just a little too much of Yogic Force. Its potency as regards matters spiritual is undeniable, but for artistic or intellectual things one cant be so sure about its effectiveness. Take Dilips case; one could very well say: Why give credit to the Force? Had he been as assiduous, sincere etc. elsewhere, he would have done just the same.
  Will you explain to me how Dilip who could not write a single good poem and had no power over rhythm and metre before he came here, suddenly, not after long assiduous efforts, blossomed into a poet, rhythmist and metrist after he came here? Why was Tagore dumbfounded by the lame man throwing away his crutches and running freely and surely on the paths of rhythm? Why was it that I who never understood or cared for painting, suddenly in a single hour by an opening of vision got the eye to see and the mind of understanding about colour, line and design? How was it that I who was unable to under stand and follow a metaphysical argument and whom a page of Kant or Hegel or Hume or even Berkeley left either dazed and uncomprehending and fatigued or totally uninterested because I could not fathom or follow, suddenly began writing pages of the stuff as soon as I started the Arya and am now reputed to be a great philosopher? How is it that at a time when I felt it difficult to produce more than a paragraph of prose from time to time and more than a rare poem, short and laboured, perhaps one in two months, suddenly after concentrating and practising Pranayama daily began to write pages and pages in a single day and kept sufficient faculty to edit a big daily paper and afterwards to write 60 pages of philosophy every month? Kindly reflect a little and dont talk facile nonsense. Even if a thing can be done in a moment or a few days by Yoga which would ordinarily take a long, assiduous, sincere and earnest cultivation, that would of itself show the power of the Yoga force. But here a faculty that did not exist appears quickly and spontaneously or impotence changes into highest potency or an obstructed talent changes with equal rapidity into fluent and facile sovereignty. If you deny that evidence, no evidence will convince you, because you are determined to think otherwise.

2.2.02 - Consciousness and the Inconscient, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There is, obvious and undeniable, an Energy that creates and there is a creation; these are the only two affirmations we can make which are beyond doubt. Even if we take the creation to be illusory, still the illusory creation is there and there is a
  Force or Energy or Power that has created it, whether it be mere unconscious Energy, Prakriti, or an energy of deceptive consciousness, Maya.

2.3.03 - The Overmind, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
  The Overmind and the Supermind Descent

3.00.2 - Introduction, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  The existence of this aspect is undeniable, but it is not always the only one
  and not always the essential one. Another is the will to power (described

30.14 - Rabindranath and Modernism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   How the two original streams of thought, oriental and occidental, were synthesised in Tagore's work is a subject that demands a deep study. I do not propose to deal with the subject in its entirety, but I shall try to point out a few salient features. The European consciousness, especially modern, is centred on this physical world, this living body endowed with the ardent senses, on the undeniable reality of the outside world where, after all, things are transitory; and of the dualistic life it espouses, this consciousness lays more stress on death than on life, on misery than on happiness, on shadow than on light; it seeks beauty and fulfilment in contrast and conflict in human life and consciousness. Inspired by this idea our poet sings:
   Not for me liberation through renunciation.

3.02 - The Motives of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Faced with the sense of a Power or perhaps a number of Powers greater and higher than himself by whom his life in Nature is overshadowed, influenced, governed, man naturally applies to it or to them the first primitive feelings of the natural being among the difficulties, desires and dangers of that life, - fear and interest. The enormous part played by these motives in the evolution of the religious instinct, is undeniable, and in fact, man being what he is, it could hardly have been less; and even when religion has advanced fairly far on its road, we see these motives still surviving, active, playing a sufficiently large part, justified and appealed to by Religion herself in support of her claims on man. The fear of God, it is said, - or, it may be added for the sake of historical truth, the fear of the Gods, - is the beginning of religion, a half-truth upon which scientific research, trying to trace the evolution of religion, ordinarily in a critical and often a hostile rather than in a sympathetic spirit, has laid undue emphasis. But not the fear of God only, for man does not act, even most primitively, from fear alone, but from twin motives, fear and desire, fear of things unpleasant and maleficent and desire of things pleasant and beneficent, - therefore from fear and interest. Life to him is primarily and engrossingly, - until he learns to live more in his soul and only secondarily in the action and reaction of outward things, - a series of actions and results, things to be desired, pursued and gained by action and things to be dreaded and shunned, yet which may come upon him as a result of action. And it is not only by his own action but by that also of others and of Nature around him that these things come to him. As soon, then, as he comes to sense a Power behind all this which can influence or determine action and result, he conceives of it as a dispenser of boons and sufferings, able and under certain conditions willing to help him or hurt, save and destroy.
  In the most primitive parts of his being he conceives of it as a thing of natural egoistic impulses like himself, beneficent when pleased, maleficent when offended; worship is then a means of propitiation by gifts and a supplication by prayer. He gets God on his side by praying to him and flattering him. With a more advanced mentality, he conceives of the action of life as reposing on a certain principle of divine justice, which he reads always according to his own ideas and character, as a sort of enlarged copy of his human justice; he conceives the idea of moral good and evil and looks upon suffering and calamity and all things unpleasant as a punishment for his sins and upon happiness and good fortune and all things pleasant as a reward of his virtue. God appears to him as a king, judge, legislator, executor of justice. But still regarding him as a sort of magnified Man, he imagines that as his own justice can be deflected by prayers and propitiation, so the divine justice can also be deflected by the same means. Justice is to him reward and punishment, and the justice of punishment can be modified by mercy to the suppliant, while rewards can be supplemented by special favours and kindness such as Power when pleased can always bestow on its adherents and worshippers. Moreover God like ourselves is capable of wrath and revenge, and wrath and revenge can be turned by gifts and supplication and atonement; he is capable too of partiality, and his partiality can be attracted by gifts, by prayer and by praise. Therefore instead of relying solely on the observation of the moral law, worship as prayer and propitiation is still continued.

3.1.04 - Transformation in the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Transformation is a word that I have brought in myself (like supermind) to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts of the integral Yoga. People are now taking them up and using them in senses which have nothing to do with the significance which I put into them. Purification of the nature by the influence of the Spirit is not what I mean by transformation; purification is only part of a psychic change or a psycho-spiritual change the word besides has many senses and is very often given a moral or ethical meaning which is foreign to my purpose. What I mean by the spiritual transformation is something dynamic (not merely liberation of the self, or realisation of the One which can very well be attained without any descent). It is a putting on of the spiritual consciousness dynamic as well as static in every part of the being down to the subconscient. That cannot be done by the influence of the Self leaving the consciousness fundamentally as it is with only purification, enlightenment of the mind and heart and quiescence of the vital. It means a bringing down of Divine Consciousness static and dynamic into all these parts and the entire replacement of the present consciousness by that. This we find unveiled and unmixed above mind, life and body and not in mind, life and body. It is a matter of the undeniable experience of many that this can descend and it is my experience that nothing short of its full descent can thoroughly remove the veil and mixture and effect the full spiritual transformation. No metaphysical or logical reasoning in the void as to what the Atman must do or can do or needs or needs not to do is relevant here or of any value. I may add that transformation is not the central object of other paths as it is of this Yogaonly so much purification and change is demanded by them as will lead to liberation and the beyond-life. The influence of the Atman can no doubt do thata full descent of a new Consciousness into the whole nature from top to bottom to transform life here is not needed at all for the spiritual escape from life.
  ***

3.4.03 - Materialism, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Mark that it is the first fact of experience from which we start and up to a certain point an undeniable universal truth of being. Matter surely is here our basis, the one thing that is and persists, while life, mind, soul and all else appear in it as a secondary phenomenon, seem somehow to arise out of it, subsist by feeding upon it,therefore the word used in the Upanishads for Matter is annam, food, and collapse from our view when it disappears. Apparently the existence of Matter is necessary to them, their existence does not appear to be one whit necessary to Matter. The Being does present himself at first with this face, inexorably, as if claiming to be that and nothing else, insisting that his material base and its need shall first be satisfied and, until that is done, grimly persistent with little or with no regard for our idealistic susceptibilities and caring nothing if he breaks through the delicate net of our moral, our aesthetic and our other finer perceptions. They have the hope of their reign, but meanwhile this is the first visage of universal existence and we have not to hide our face from it any more than could Arjuna from the terrible figure of the Divine on the battle-field of Kurukshetra, or attempt to escape and evade it as Shiva, when there rose around him the many stupendous forms of the original Energy, fled from the vision of it to this and that quarter, forgetful of his own godhead. We must look existence in the face in whatever aspect it confronts us and be strong to find within as well as behind it the Divine.
  Materialistic science had the courage to look at this universal truth with level eyes, to accept it calmly as a starting-point and to inquire whether it was not after all the whole formula of universal being. Physical science must necessarily to its own first view be materialistic, because so long as it deals with the physical, it has for its own truths sake to be physical both in its standpoint and method; it must interpret the material universe first in the language and tokens of the material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general terms and all others come second, subsequently, are a special syllabary. To follow a self-indulgent course from the beginning would lead at once towards fancies and falsities. Initially, science is justified in resenting any call on it to indulge in another kind of imagination and intuition. Anything that draws it out of the circle of the phenomena of objects, as they are represented to the senses and their instrumental prolongations, and away from the dealings of the reason with them by a rigorous testing of experience and experimentation, must distract it from its task and is inadmissible. It cannot allow the bringing in of the human view of things; it has to interpret man in the terms of the cosmos, not the cosmos in the terms of man. The too facile conclusion of the idealist that since things only exist as known to consciousness, they can exist only by consciousness and must be creations of the mind, has no meaning for it; it first has to inquire what consciousness is, whether it is not a result rather than a cause of Matter, coming into being, as it seems to do, only in the frame of a material inconscient universe and apparently able to exist only on the condition that that has been previously established. Starting from Matter, science has to be at least hypothetically materialistic.

3.7.1.08 - Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Karma, - not necessarily in the form the ancients gave to it, but in the idea at its centre, - which at once strikes the mind and commands the assent of the understanding. Nor does the austerer reason, distrustful of first impressions and critical of plausible solutions, find after the severest scrutiny that the more superficial understanding, the porter at the gateways of our mentality, has been deceived into admitting a tinsel guest, a false claimant into our mansion of knowledge. There is a solidity at once of philosophic and of practical truth supporting the idea, a bedrock of the deepest universal undeniable verities against which the human mind must always come up in its fathomings of the fathomless; in this way indeed does the world deal with us, there is a law here which does so make itself felt and against which all our egoistic ignorance and self-will and violence dashes up in the end, as the old Greek poet said of the haughty insolence and prosperous pride of man, against the very foundation of the throne of Zeus, the marble feet of Themis, the adamantine bust of Ananke. There is the secret of an eternal factor, the base of the unchanging action of the just and truthful gods, devanam dhruvan.i vratani, in the self-sufficient and impartial law of Karma.
  This truth of Karma has been always recognised in the East in one form or else in another; but to the Buddhists belongs the credit of having given to it the clearest and fullest universal enunciation and the most insistent importance. In the West too the idea has constantly recurred, but in external, in fragmentary glimpses, as the recognition of a pragmatic truth of experience, and mostly as an ordered ethical law or fatality set over against the self-will and strength of man: but it was clouded over by other ideas inconsistent with any reign of law, vague ideas of

4.04 - In the Total Christ, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  an undeniable fact explain it how one will that
  the most ardent and most massive blaze of collec-

4.23 - The supramental Instruments -- Thought-process, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And if this elaborated method of the mind were really sufficient for truth, there would be no need of any higher step in the evolution of knowledge. In fact, it increases the mind's hold on itself and on the world around it and serves great and undeniable utilities: but it can never be sure whether its data supply it with the frame of a real knowledge or only a frame useful and necessary for the human mind and will in its own present form of action. It is more and more perceived that the knowledge of phenomena increases, but the knowledge of reality escapes this laborious process. A time must come, is already coming when the mind perceives the necessity of calling to its aid and developing fully the intuition and all the great range of powers that lie concealed behind our vague use of the word and uncertain perception of its significance. In the end it must discover that these powers can not only aid and complete but even replace its own proper action. That will be the beginning of the discovery of the supramental energy of the spirit.
  The supermind, as we have seen, lifts up the action of the mental consciousness towards and into the intuition, creates an intermediate intuitive mentality insufficient in itself but greater in power than the logical intelligence, and then lifts up and transforms that too into the true supramental action. The first well-organised action of the supermind in the ascending order is the supramental reason, not a higher logical intellect, but a directly luminous organisation of intimately subjective and intimately objective knowledge, the higher buddhi, the logical or rather the logos, Vijnana. The supramental reason does all the work of the reasoning intelligence and does much more, but with a greater power and in a different fashion. It is then itself taken up into a higher range of the power of knowledge and in that too nothing is lost, but all farther heightened, enlarged in scope, transformed in power of action.

4.4.1.01 - The Meaning of Spiritual Transformation, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is a matter of the undeniable experience of many that this can
  descend and it is my experience that nothing short of its full

6.09 - THE THIRD STAGE - THE UNUS MUNDUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  [767] If Dorn, then, saw the consummation of the mysterium coniunctionis in the union of the alchemically produced caelum with the unus mundus, he expressly meant not a fusion of the individual with his environment, or even his adaptation to it, but a unio mystica with the potential world. Such a view indeed seems to us mystical, if we misuse this word in its pejorative modern sense. It is not, however, a question of thoughtlessly used words but of a view which can be translated from medieval language into modern concepts. Undoubtedly the idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, and that not two or more fundamentally different worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another. Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same world, which is not the world of sense but a postulate whose probability is vouched for by the fact that until now no one has been able to discover a world in which the known laws of nature are invalid. That even the psychic world, which is so extraordinarily different from the physical world, does not have its roots outside the one cosmos is evident from the undeniable fact that causal connections exist between the psyche and the body which point to their underlying unitary nature.
  [768] All that is is not encompassed by our knowledge, so that we are not in a position to make any statements about its total nature. Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknown side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. Both lines of investigation have yielded findings which can be conceived only by means of antinomies, and both have developed concepts which display remarkable analogies. If this trend should become more pronounced in the future, the hypothesis of the unity of their subject-matters would gain in probability. Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental backgrounda fact which, as Sir James Jeans has shown, can be expressed by Platos parable of the cave. The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.

7.01 - The Soul (the Psychic), #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  The inner contact with the psychic is a concrete and undeniable fact which imposes itself on all sincere consciousness.
  5 April 1972

BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  Kabalistic esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The
  intellectual evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand with the physical, has certainly been a curse instead
  --
  character which become irrefutable and are undeniable in the long run, to every earnest and
  unprejudiced mind. For a series of years such were offered to her, and now she has the full certitude
  --
  types and races, it is only because the fact is undeniable, no one would say that there was no external
  difference between an Englishman, an African negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the other hand

BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  quarters that the XXth century will be yet in its earliest teens, when such undeniable proof of Man's
  priority will be forthcoming.
  --
  order of events "intentionally," is undeniable, and for a very good reason: their writings and records
  were all esoteric. The Babylonian priests did no more than the Priests of other ancient nations. Their
  --
  disappeared without leaving any undeniable trace. He had studied the ancient classics and traditions
  extensively, and he saw that the arts and sciences known to those we now call the "ancients," were
  --
  peoples of Asia." And that, notwithstanding the learning of the Hindoos, their undeniable priority in
  the antiquity of their race had to be referred to a people or a race still more ancient and more learned
  --
  open to. It has denied even the undeniable, from the days of the mathematician Laplace down to our
  own, and that only a few years ago.* We have Professor Huxley's authority for saying that there is no a

BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  understands the undeniable, clear, and mathematical proofs that the esoteric foundations, or the system
  used in the building of the Great Pyramid, and the architectural measurements in the Temple of
  --
  make of the same Mercury the ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius (De Idol., II.,
  373)
  --
  periodicity and variety is governed by the number seven is undeniable, and it far
  surpasses the limits of mere chance, and must be assumed to have an adequate cause,

BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  The same will be said of the Secret Archaic Doctrine, when proofs are given of its undeniable
  existence and records. But it will take centuries before much more is given from it. Speaking of the
  --
  Sankaracharya,** is undeniable.
  (b) Dreamless sleep is one of the seven states of consciousness known in Oriental esotericism. In each
  --
  Jewish nation, sounds like an undeniable prophecy for themselves. And this accounts also for St.
  Ambrose (On Amos, ch. iv.) declaring that it is precisely for that reason that "we curse the NorthWind, and that during the ceremony of baptism we begin by turning towards the West (Sidereal), to

BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  This "New Force," or whatever Science may call it, the effects of which are undeniable -- admitted by
  more than one naturalist and physicist who has visited Mr. Keely's laboratory and witnessed
  --
  difficulty arising for them out of such undeniable variety and heterogeneity of matter in the
  constitution of nebulae, did admit, with the ancients, that the origin of all the visible and invisible
  --
  Noachian deluge. It has become undeniable of late that the Jews, who obtained their primitive ideas
  about creation from Moses, who had them from

Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  Did Steiner dream these things? Did he dream them because they had occurred ages earlier? What is undeniable is
  that they are far stranger than the demiurges, serpents, and

BOOK XV. - The progress of the earthly and heavenly cities traced by the sacred history, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  Some one, then, will say, Is it to be believed that a man who intended to beget children, and had no intention of continence, abstained from sexual intercourse a hundred years and more, or even, according to the Hebrew version, only a little less, say eighty, seventy, or sixty years; or, if he did not abstain, was unable to beget offspring? This question admits of two solutions. For either puberty was so much later as the whole life was longer, or, which seems to me more likely, it is not the first-born sons that are here mentioned, but those whose names were required to fill up the series until Noah was reached, from whom again we see that the succession is continued to Abraham, and after him down to that point of time until which it was needful to mark by pedigree the course of the most glorious city, which sojourns as a stranger in this world, and seeks the heavenly country. That which is undeniable is that Cain was the first who was born of man and woman. For had he not been the first who was added by birth to the two unborn persons, Adam could not have said what he is recorded to have said, "I have gotten a man by[Pg 76] the Lord."[176] He was followed by Abel, whom the elder brother slew, and who was the first to show, by a kind of foreshadowing of the sojourning city of God, what iniquitous persecutions that city would suffer at the hands of wicked and, as it were, earth-born men, who love their earthly origin, and delight in the earthly happiness of the earthly city. But how old Adam was when he begat these sons does not appear. After this the generations diverge, the one branch deriving from Cain, the other from him whom Adam begot in the room of Abel slain by his brother, and whom he called Seth, saying, as it is written, "For God hath raised me up another seed for Abel whom Cain slew."[177] These two series of generations accordingly, the one of Cain, the other of Seth, represent the two cities in their distinctive ranks, the one the heavenly city, which sojourns on earth, the other the earthly, which gapes after earthly joys, and grovels in them as if they were the only joys. But though eight generations, including Adam, are registered before the flood, no man of Cain's line has his age recorded at which the son who succeeded him was begotten. For the Spirit of God refused to mark the times before the flood in the generations of the earthly city, but preferred to do so in the heavenly line, as if it were more worthy of being remembered. Further, when Seth was born, the age of his father is mentioned; but already he had begotten other sons, and who will presume to say that Cain and Abel were the only ones previously begotten? For it does not follow that they alone had been begotten of Adam, because they alone were named in order to continue the series of generations which it was desirable to mention. For though the names of all the rest are buried in silence, yet it is said that Adam begot sons and daughters; and who that cares to be free from the charge of temerity will dare to say how many his offspring numbered? It was possible enough that Adam was divinely prompted to say, after Seth was born, "For God hath raised up to me another seed for Abel," because that son was to be capable of representing Abel's holiness, not because he was born first after him in point of time. Then because it is written, "And Seth lived 205 years," or, according to the Hebrew reading,[Pg 77] "105 years, and begat Enos,"[178] who but a rash man could affirm that this was his first-born? Will any man do so to excite our wonder, and cause us to inquire how for so many years he remained free from sexual intercourse, though without any purpose of continuing so, or how, if he did not abstain, he yet had no children? Will any man do so when it is written of him, "And he begat sons and daughters, and all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died?"[179] And similarly regarding those whose years are afterwards mentioned, it is not disguised that they begat sons and daughters.
  Consequently it does not at all appear whether he who is named as the son was himself the first begotten. Nay, since it is incredible that those fathers were either so long in attaining puberty, or could not get wives, or could not impregnate them, it is also incredible that those sons were their first-born. But as the writer of the sacred history designed to descend by well-marked intervals through a series of generations to the birth and life of Noah, in whose time the flood occurred, he mentioned not those sons who were first begotten, but those by whom the succession was handed down.

BOOK XX. - Of the last judgment, and the declarations regarding it in the Old and New Testaments, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  When, therefore, we read in the prophetical books that God is to come to do judgment at the last, from the mere mention[Pg 410] of the judgment, and although there is nothing else to determine the meaning, we must gather that Christ is meant; for though the Father will judge, He will judge by the coming of the Son. For He Himself, by His own manifested presence, "judges no man, but has committed all judgment to the Son;"[847] for as the Son was judged as a man, He shall also judge in human form. For it is none but He of whom God speaks by Isaiah under the name of Jacob and Israel, of whose seed Christ took a body, as it is written, "Jacob is my servant, I will uphold Him; Israel is mine elect, my Spirit has assumed Him: I have put my Spirit upon Him; He shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor cease, neither shall His voice be heard without. A bruised reed shall He not break, and the smoking flax shall He not quench: but in truth shall He bring forth judgment. He shall shine and shall not be broken, until He sets judgment in the earth: and the nations shall hope in His name."[848] The Hebrew has not "Jacob" and "Israel;" but the Septuagint translators, wishing to show the significance of the expression "my servant," and that it refers to the form of a servant in which the Most High humbled Himself, inserted the name of that man from whose stock He took the form of a servant. The Holy Spirit was given to Him, and was manifested, as the evangelist testifies, in the form of a dove.[849] He brought forth judgment to the Gentiles, because He predicted what was hidden from them. In His meekness He did not cry, nor did He cease to proclaim the truth. But His voice was not heard, nor is it heard, without, because He is not obeyed by those who are outside of His body. And the Jews themselves, who persecuted Him, He did not break, though as a bruised reed they had lost their integrity, and as smoking flax their light was quenched; for He spared them, having come to be judged and not yet to judge. He brought forth judgment in truth, declaring that they should be punished did they persist in their wickedness. His face shone on the Mount,[850] His fame in the world. He is not broken nor overcome, because neither in Himself nor in His[Pg 411] Church has persecution prevailed to annihilate Him. And therefore that has not, and shall not, be brought about which His enemies said or say, "When shall He die, and His name perish?"[851] "until He set judgment in the earth." Behold, the hidden thing which we were seeking is discovered. For this is the last judgment, which He will set in the earth when He comes from heaven. And it is in Him, too, we already see the concluding expression of the prophecy fulfilled: "In His name shall the nations hope." And by this fulfilment, which no one can deny, men are encouraged to believe in that which is most impudently denied. For who could have hoped for that which even those who do not yet believe in Christ now see fulfilled among us, and which is so undeniable that they can but gnash their teeth and pine away? Who, I say, could have hoped that the nations would hope in the name of Christ, when He was arrested, bound, scourged, mocked, crucified, when even the disciples themselves had lost the hope which they had begun to have in Him? The hope which was then entertained scarcely by the one thief on the cross, is now cherished by nations everywhere on the earth, who are marked with the sign of the cross on which He died that they may not die eternally.
  That the last judgment, then, shall be administered by Jesus Christ in the manner predicted in the sacred writings is denied or doubted by no one, unless by those who, through some incredible animosity or blindness, decline to believe these writings, though already their truth is demonstrated to all the world. And at or in connection with that judgment the following events shall come to pass, as we have learned: Elias the Tishbite shall come; the Jews shall believe; Antichrist shall persecute; Christ shall judge; the dead shall rise; the good and the wicked shall be separated; the world shall be burned and renewed. All these things, we believe, shall come to pass; but how, or in what order, human understanding cannot perfectly teach us, but only the experience of the events themselves. My opinion, however, is, that they will happen in the order in which I have related them.

ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  Matter (hypostatic), existence as undeniable as that of good, i. 8.15 (51-1162).
  Matter, if primary, would be form of the universe, iii. 6.18 (26-382).

Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
   undeniable signs. Thus, among hands, some are laborious, some are idle,
   some square and heavy, others insinuating and light. Hard and dry hands

Liber 71 - The Voice of the Silence - The Two Paths - The Seven Portals, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
   remain undeniable. It is the first reversed triangle of the Tree of
   Life.

Meno, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  MENO: The fact, Socrates, is undeniable.
  SOCRATES: But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, then he must have had and learned it at some other time?

r1927 01 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Today the health and Ananda will develop. Tomorrow the evidence will be undeniable.
   The attack on her body yesterday flatly denies the Thursday prediction. In this body there is evidence of control, but not of any final progress. The obstruction to finality is still successful, still obstinate.

Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
  Say: O concourse of divines! Pronounce ye censure against this Pen unto which, as soon as it raised its shrill voice, the kingdom of utterance prepared itself to hearken, and before whose mighty and glorious theme every other theme hath paled into insignificance? Fear ye God and follow not your idle fancies and corrupt imaginings, but rather follow Him Who is come unto you invested with undeniable knowledge and unshakeable certitude. The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 4 p. 217
  62
  --
  Know thou moreover that thy letter reached Our presence and We perceived and perused its contents. We noted the questions thou hast asked and will readily answer thee. It behooveth everyone in this Day to ask God that which he desireth, and thy Lord will heed his petition with wondrous and undeniable verses.
  Thou hast asked regarding the subject of the return. Know thou that the end is like unto the beginning. Even as thou dost consider the beginning, similarly shouldst thou consider the end, and be of them that truly perceive. Nay, rather consider the beginning as the end itself, and so conversely, that thou mayest acquire a clear perception. Know thou moreover that every created thing is continually brought forth and returned at the bidding of thy Lord, the God of power and might.

The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
  originality and not with the undeniable, but trivial consideration that
  if they had not lived somebody else would have done it some time; for
  --
  what I think till I see what I say?' For it is, of course, undeniable that
  in some forms of intellectual activity language is not only an indis-

The Aleph, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  He then reread me four or five different fragments of the poem. He had revised them following his pet principle of verbal ostentation: where at first "blue" had been good enough, he now wallowed in "azures," "ceruleans," and "ultramarines." The word "milky" was too easy for him; in the course of an impassioned description of a shed where wool was washed, he chose such words as "lacteal," "lactescent," and even made one up -- "lactinacious." After that, straight out, he condemned our modern mania for having books prefaced, "a practice already held up to scorn by the Prince of Wits in his own grafeful preface to the Quixote." He admitted, however, that for the opening of his new work an attention-getting foreword might prove valuable -- "an accolade signed by a literary hand of renown." He next went on to say that he considered publishing the initial cantos of his poem. I then began to understand the unexpected telephone call; Daneri was going to ask me to contri bute a foreword to his pedantic hodgepodge. My fear turned out unfounded; Carlos Argentino remarked, with admiration and envy, that surely he could not be far wrong in qualifying with the ephitet "solid" the prestige enjoyed in every circle by Alvaro Melian Lafinur, a man of letters, who would, if I insisted on it, be only too glad to dash off some charming opening words to the poem. In order to avoid ignominy and failure, he suggested I make myself spokesman for two of the book's undeniable virtues -- formal perfection and scientific rigour -- "inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of figures of speech, of elegances, is inhospitable to the least detail not strictly upholding of truth." He added that Beatriz had always been taken with Alvaro.
  I agreed -- agreed profusely -- and explained for the sake of credibility that I would not speak to Alvaro the next day, Monday, but would wait until Thursday, when we got together for the informal dinner that follows every meeting of the Writers' Club. (No such dinners are ever held, but it is an established fact that the meetings do take place on Thursdays, a point which Carlos Argentino Daneri could verify in the daily papers, and which lent a certain reality to my promise.) Half in prophecy, half in cunning, I said that before taking up the question of a preface I would outline the unusual plan of the work. We then said goodbye.

The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  Be that as it may, it remains undeniable is that all the Gothic buildings without exception
  reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal. If, in particular, we examine
  --
  the fact is undeniable and rigorously controlled, why is it that it is impossible for us to
  reproduce it simply by reading the formula charged with explaining its mechanism? For, in
  --
  considerations, that the philosophers stone or universal Medicine, in spite of its undeniable
  metallic origin, is not uniquely made from metallic matter. If it were otherwise, and if one had
  --
  knowledge shows a more or less important virtue. For it is undeniable that the philosophers
  stone used for the transmutation of metals is never endowed with the same power. Historical

The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
  absoluteness as if they were Truth entire and undeniable. There is an
  impression that one has become impersonal and free from ego, while

The Shadow Out Of Time, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult
  activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.

WORDNET



--- Overview of adj undeniable

The adj undeniable has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
                  
1. (2) undeniable ::: (not possible to deny)





--- Similarity of adj undeniable

1 sense of undeniable                        

Sense 1
undeniable (vs. deniable)
   => incontestable, indisputable, undisputable
   => incontrovertible, irrefutable, positive
     Also See-> unquestionable#1


--- Antonyms of adj undeniable

1 sense of undeniable                        

Sense 1
undeniable (vs. deniable)

deniable (vs. undeniable)
    => disavowable
    => questionable, refutable, confutable, confutative



--- Pertainyms of adj undeniable

1 sense of undeniable                        

Sense 1
undeniable (vs. deniable)


--- Derived Forms of adj undeniable
                                    




IN WEBGEN [10000/26]

Wikipedia - ROH Undeniable -- 2007 Ring of Honor pay-per-view event
Wikipedia - Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation -- Non-fiction book by Bill Nye
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1044380.An_Undeniable_Rogue
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13516112-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16082535-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16109563-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21853626-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22735443-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24691909-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25965834-undeniable-love
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27510208-easier-said-than-done-the-undeniable-tour-tested-truths-you-must-know
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28250215-undeniable-temptation
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34434035-undeniable-attraction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41477732-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45133648-undeniable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6407336-undeniable
Famous in Love ::: TV-14 | 42min | Drama, Romance | TV Series (20172018) -- A college student's big break in a Hollywood blockbuster leaves her navigating through an undeniable chemistry. Creators: I. Marlene King, Rebecca Serle
https://alvin.fandom.com/wiki/Undeniable_(Album)
K-On! Movie -- -- Kyoto Animation -- 1 ep -- 4-koma manga -- Music Slice of Life Comedy -- K-On! Movie K-On! Movie -- Graduation looms for the founding members of the Light Music Club. With only a few precious weeks of school left, the girls decide to make the most of it and plan a trip abroad. Hawaii, New York, Dubai—many destinations are suggested, but after a little help from the club's precious pet turtle, Ton-chan, London is chosen as the host of their next misadventure! -- -- Yui Hirasawa, Mio Akiyama, Tsumugi Kotobuki, Ritsu Tainaka, and Azusa Nakano will visit famous landmarks, perform live music for Londoners, and eat all sorts of delicious food, all while stumbling clumsily from place to place. But the fun won't last forever, as heartfelt songs and goodbyes will be made as their high school days together come to a close. One thing is for certain though: the undeniable friendships these girls have formed is something that will carry on long after the final scene rolls. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- Movie - Dec 3, 2011 -- 248,642 8.33
ROH Undeniable
The Undeniable LP
Undeniable
Undeniable (Chipmunks album)
Undeniable (Hellyeah album)
Undeniable (miniseries)
Undeniable (Raven-Symon album)



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Savitri -- Savitri extended toc
Savitri Section Map -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
authors -- Crowley - Peterson - Borges - Wilber - Teresa - Aurobindo - Ramakrishna - Maharshi - Mother
places -- Garden - Inf. Art Gallery - Inf. Building - Inf. Library - Labyrinth - Library - School - Temple - Tower - Tower of MEM
powers -- Aspiration - Beauty - Concentration - Effort - Faith - Force - Grace - inspiration - Presence - Purity - Sincerity - surrender
difficulties -- cowardice - depres. - distract. - distress - dryness - evil - fear - forget - habits - impulse - incapacity - irritation - lost - mistakes - obscur. - problem - resist - sadness - self-deception - shame - sin - suffering
practices -- Lucid Dreaming - meditation - project - programming - Prayer - read Savitri - study
subjects -- CS - Cybernetics - Game Dev - Integral Theory - Integral Yoga - Kabbalah - Language - Philosophy - Poetry - Zen
6.01 books -- KC - ABA - Null - Savitri - SA O TAOC - SICP - The Gospel of SRK - TIC - The Library of Babel - TLD - TSOY - TTYODAS - TSZ - WOTM II
8 unsorted / add here -- Always - Everyday - Verbs


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last updated: 2022-05-01 18:25:01
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