You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself Any direction you choose.
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(1) Do not let your children make toys out of flies/butterflies or birds. Such behavior results in injury to living creatures, but also it arouses in young hearts an impulse to cruelty and murder. Stories illustrative of the commandments: (2) The wife of a soldier named Fan was tuberculous and close to death. She was ordered to eat the brains of 100 sparrows as a remedy. When she saw the birds in the cage, she sighed and said: 'Must it be that 100 living creatures are to be killed that I may be healed? I would rather die than permit them to suffer.' She opened the cage and allowed them to fly away. Afterwards she recovered from her illness. (3) Tsao-Pin lived in a ruined house. His children begged him to have it repaired. He answered: 'In the cold winter the cracks in the walls and the space between the tiles and between the stones provide a shelter and a refuge to all kinds of living creatures. We should not endanger their lives.' (4) Wu-Tang used to take his son hunting with him. One day they came upon a stag that was playing with its young one. Tang took an arrow and killed the young one. The frightened stag ran off with a cry of anguish. When Tang concealed himself the stag returned and licked the wounds of its fawn. Tang again drew his bow and killed it. He then saw another stag and sent an arrow towards it, but the arrow was deflected and pierced his son. Tang threw his bow away and tearfully embraced his dead son, when he heard a voice from the air: 'Tang, the stag loved its fawn as much as you loved your son.' (5) Meng-tse praises King Suan of Tsi because of his compassion in freeing an ox that was to be sacrificed at the dedication of some bells. Such a sentiment, he says, should suffice to make one king of the world. Monastic Taoism & Kan-Ying-P'ien. From the commandments for monks: (1st): Thou shalt kill no living thing nor do injury to its life. (2nd): Thou shalt not consume as food the flesh and blood of any living creature. (34th): Thou shall not strike or whip domestic animals. (35th): Thou shall not intentionally crush insects and ants with thy foot. (36th): Thou shalt not play with hooks and arrows for thine own amusement. (37th): Thou shalt not climb into trees to remove nests and to destroy the eggs. (63rd): Thou shalt not catch birds and quadrupeds with snares and nets. (64th): Thou shalt not frighten and scare away birds that are brooding on their nests. (68th): Thou shalt not dig up during the winter months animals hibernating in the earth. (112th): Thou shalt not pour hot water on the ground in order to exterminate insects and ants.
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You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
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When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.
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Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
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We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us. Ideas of the Stone Age exist side by side with the latest scientific thought. Only a fraction of mankind has emerged from the Dark Ages, and in the most lucid brains, as Logan Pearsall Smith has said, we come upon nests of woolly caterpillars. Seemingly sane men entrust their wealth to stargazers and their health to witch doctors. Giant planes throb through the stratosphere, but half their passengers are wearing magic amulets and are protected from harm by voodoo incantations. Hotels boast of express elevators and a telephone in every room, but omit thirteen from all floor and room numbers lest their guests be ill at ease.
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It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.
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I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
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Sonny Hey, whataya gonna do, nice college boy, eh Didn't want to get mixed up in the Family business, huh Now you wanna gun down a police captain. Why Because he slapped ya in the face a little bit Hah What do you think this is the Army, where you shoot 'em a mile away You've gotta get up close like this and bada-bing. you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.
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Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.
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Or, at least, one-tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid and often painful and uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which suprised her. Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed to use only about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
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I am...blood. That primordial ooze. Not out there, listeners, in here. Inside this skin we wear, it only lets us think we're something else-- nice clean brains, little talking computers running around in the pursuit of happiness. We pierce this skin and what do we see Warm ooze, protoplasm churning and jesting, defecating, pulsating, life, death.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a MaCaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
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It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.
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Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.
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Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil.
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American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
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O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts!
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'The god has not yet answered to our pity For the black vision and tangle in her brains,...
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Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
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Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
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Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.
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You don't need any brains to listen to music.
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There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it, from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
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A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
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A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.
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How very seldom do you encounter in the world a man of great abilities, acquirements, experience, who will unmask his mind, unbutton his brains, and pour forth in careless and picturesque phrase all the results of his studies and observation; his knowledge of men, books, and nature. On the contrary, if a man has by any chance an original idea, he hoards it as if it were old gold; and rather avoids the subject with which he is most conversant, from fear that you may appropriate his best thoughts.
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Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. the only thing in the world not for sale is character.
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To a very large extent men and women are a product of how they define themselves. As a result of a combination of innate ideas and the intimate influences of the culture and environment we grow up in, we come to have beliefs about the nature of being human. These beliefs penetrate to a very deep level of our psychosomatic systems, our minds and brains, our nervous systems, our endocrine systems, and even our blood and sinews. We act, speak, and think according to these deeply held beliefs and belief systems.
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