Quotes on Schemes

Reality isn't a vast, fixed scheme trapping you without choice. At any moment you have the choice to break out of what is really trapping you-your automatic reactions dredged up from the past.

Why cannot we work at cooperative schemes and search for the common ground binding all mankind together?

They say you forget your troubles on a trout stream, but that's not quite it. What happens is that you begin to see where your troubles fit into the grand scheme of things, and suddenly they're just not such a big deal anymore.

Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all our unhappiness.

Love is a madman, working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, running through the mountains...

No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

As many micro-credit schemes across the world can testify, investment in women is the best investment for the future.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called Planet Earth. As we learn how we fit into the greater scheme of things, and begin to understand how the system works, we can plan ahead, we can use the resources responsibly, to show some respect for this inheritance that goes back 4.6 billion years.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves."

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane In proving foresight may be vain The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain For promis'd joy!

You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of mathematical schemes which nature presents us. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationship, which nature suddenly spreads out before us.

A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.

When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. It's hard to understand failure when you're going through it, but in the grand scheme of things it's good to fall down - not because you're drunk and not near stairs.

I love enemies, though not in the Christian way. They amuse me, excite my blood. Being always on one’s guard, catching every glance, the significance of every word, guessing at intentions, frustrating their plots, pretending to be tricked, and suddenly, with a shove, upturning the whole enormous and arduously built edifice of their cunning and schemes—that’s what I call life.

I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.