Quotes on Circumstances

Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.

For me, survival is the ability to cope with difficulties, with circumstances, and to overcome them.

To will everything that God wills, and to will it always, in all circumstances and without reservations: that is the kingdom of God which is entirely within.

We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.

Successful men and women become successful because they acquire the habit of thinking in terms of success. Get the success habit in the small circumstances you control, and soon you'll be controlling the bigger ones.

Whenever you are able, have a "look" inside yourself to see whether you are unconsciously creating conflict between the inner and the outer, between your external circumstances at that moment - where you are, who you are with, or what you are doing - and your thoughts and feelings. Can you feel how painful it is to internally stand in opposition to what is? When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.

Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when the circumstances are set in extremes.

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit.

Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.

There is room for improvement in every life. Regardless of our occupations, regardless of our circumstances, we can improve ourselves and while so doing have an effect on the lives of those about us.

Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.

Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.

Look at the word responsibility-"response-ability"-the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.

The bitterness of the potion, and the abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances to the operation. It must be something to trouble and disturb the stomach that must purge and cure it.

The value of a man is in his intrinsic qualities: in that of which power cannot strip him and which adverse fortune cannot take away. That for which he is indebted to circumstances is mere trapping and tinsel.