The good social worker doesn't go on mechanically helping people out of a ditch. Pretty soon, she/he begins to find out what ought to be done to get rid of the ditch.
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Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
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It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
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Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not.
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Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.
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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Mend my life! each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do-- determined to save the only life you could save.
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If I was telling that story in a '50s style, it would have been a melodrama, ... a story of 'An innocent girl falls into the seedy, sordid world of bondage and then sees the light and is born again.' If I were telling it now in an urban, sophisticated way, you would have a story about a girl who is a free spirit, who does these lighthearted bondage photos, then she crashes and she turns to religion which would be the tragedy in the modern view, because it's so polarized now that people see any religion as representing the horrible forces of puritanism. I was trying to comment on the sad confusion surrounding sex at that time, present it in a complex way, and give her religion a fair hearing too.
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My dreams were all my own; I accounted them to nobody; They were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.
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Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.
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Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
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I don’t care if it rains or freezes long as got my plastic Jesus sitting, on the dashboard of my car. Comes in colors pink and pleasant; glows in the dark cause it’s iridescent; take it with you, when you travel far. Get yourself a pink Madonna dressed in rhinestones; sitting on a pedestal, of abalone shell. God almighty, I aint scary - cause I got the Virgin Mary... Assuring me, that I won’t go to hell.
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Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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Let me make sure I've got this right. One night in December - in the middle of the rainy season - Joseph returns home from work and announces to his wife, Mary (a young lass of thireteen or fourteen in her ninth month of pregnancy) that they must immediately depart for Bethlehem in order to fulfill some vague scriptural prophecy. It's a journey of over one hundred and thirty kilometers that passes through some of the most treacherous and hostile territory in all of Jerusalem. However, Mary, despite being jerked and jostled on the back of a jackass and struggling on foot through thick muck and mire, manages to complete this arduous trek without hemorrhaging, breaking her water, or using harsh language. No doubt this has to be another one of those take it on 'faith' stories, right?
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Like the international avant-garde, rock-and-roll is the creative product of a rebellious youth culture trying to reach a mass audience. Its a...
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Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.
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Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.
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If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
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Every failure, obstacle or hardship is an opportunity in disguise. Success in many cases is failure turned inside out. The greatest pollution problem we face today is negativity. Eliminate the negative attitude and believe you can do anything. Replace 'if I can, I hope, maybe' with 'I can, I will, I must.'
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There is a place in God's sun for the youth 'farthest down' who has the vision, the determination, and the courage to reach it.
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Lloyd There's really nothing to worry about Mary. Statistically they say you're more likely to get killed on the way to the airport. You know, like on a head on crash or flying off a cliff or getting trapped under a gas truck That's the worst I have this cousin, well y'know, I had this cousin...
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Every day I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well.
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The incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another, and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth... For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution.
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I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine. A rage, the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge in the other.
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There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.
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Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
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The Lady Mary Villiers lies Under this stone; with weeping eyes...
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People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.
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The technology has allowed someone who before had no face and no voice to become an actual child. In the 70s and 80s whenever you debated abortion you talked about the mother. Now the baby is being brought into the debate.
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Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist.
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Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
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