Quotes on Absorbing

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge.

Suppose . . . burglars had made entry into this . . . [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress.

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress.

Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There.

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.

When you stand and overcome a significant setback, you'll find an increasing inner confidence and self-assurance that has been created by conquering defeat. Absorbing and overcoming this kind of punishment engenders a sober, steely toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence and a personal belief that you can take on anything, survive and win.

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.

At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.

Where does the ego get its energy? The ego feeds off your desire to be something else. You are poor and you want to be rich - the ego is absorbing energy, its life-breath. You are ignorant and you want to become a wise one - the ego is absorbing energy. You are a wretched nobody and you want to become powerful - the ego is absorbing energy.

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

Take what's useful, discard what is not.

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. . . . Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware . . . still clinging to things that no longer exist.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.