Many people hold onto a grudge because it offers the illusion of power and a perverse feeling of security. But in fact, we are held hostage by our anger. It is never too late to forgive. But you can forgive too soon. I am especially wary of what I call saintly forgiveness. Premature forgiveness is common among people who avoid conflict. They're afraid of their own anger and the anger of others. But their forgiveness is false. Their anger goes underground. I define forgiving as letting someone back into your heart. This returns us to a loving state -- and not merely within the relationship -- we feel good about ourselves and the world. True forgiveness isn't easy, but it transforms us significantly. To forgive is to love and to feel worthy of love. In that sense, it is always worthwhile.
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The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
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There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.
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Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
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It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent celibacy, by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity backward.
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What is clearer than that man is not furnished for hunting, much less for eating, other animals? In one word, we seem to be admirably admonished by Cicero that man was destined for other things than for seizing and cutting the throats of other animals. If you answer, 'that may be said to be an industry ordered by Nature, by which such weapons are invented,' then, behold, it is by the very same artificial instrument that men make weapons for mutual slaughter. Do they this at the instigation of Nature? Can a use so noxious be called natural? Faculty is given by Nature, but it is our own fault that we make a perverse use of it.
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One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase getting something for nothing, as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed us gratis. Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic, and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing.
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Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their evil look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.
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I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
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In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
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With the perverse logic of a degenerate gambler he figured God was testing his faith.
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Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.
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It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil -- far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word human disappears from the race.
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The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: 'Prove to me why we should.'
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Leviticus 20:13:
'If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.'
(NIV)
If a man lies with a male as if he were a woman, both men have committed an offense (something perverse, unnatural, abhorrent, and detestable); they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
(AMP)
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
(KJV)
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Men of perverse opinion do not know the excellence of what is in their hands, till some one dash it from them.
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Jeremiah 17:9:
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
(NIV)
The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly perverse and corrupt and severely, mortally sick! Who can know it [perceive, understand, be acquainted with his own heart and mind]? [Matt. 13:15-17; Mark 7:21-23; Eph. 4:20-24.](AMP)
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
(KJV)
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Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the momen...
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It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.
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