I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.
Descartes left as one of his main philosophical legacies a myth which continues to distort the continental geography of the subject.
Something like this will test you like nothing else,” Mac said. “You’re going to find out who you are, Harry. You’re going to find out which principles you’ll stand by to your death – and which lines you’ll cross.” He took my empty glass away and said, “You’re heading into the badlands. It’ll be easy to get lost.
Leadership in government doesn’t emerge in a non-resistant vacuum. When the odds appear insurmountable, when the answer is no and should be yes, true leaders reveal themselves.
Her mother pinched the half of her breast that pushed up from her tube top. “What about these? You want your in-laws to see your mangoes? Save those for the man who’s going to eat them,” she hissed.
See you around, Percy,’ Nico said. ‘Annabeth.’ She raised her hand for a high five. Nico obliged. Then he walked back across the green, to where Will Solace was waiting.
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.
After what we’d been through, I would’ve expected him to hole up somewhere dark, eating raw meat, chain-smoking, guzzling some sort of ridiculous tough drink, like whiskey or kerosene or something, and thinking grim thoughts about life and death. But no, here he was, charming and untroubled, sipping coffee.
When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It’s the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside.
Cooking real food is the best defense – not to mention that any meal you’re likely to eat at home contains about 200 fewer calories than one you would eat in a restaurant.
It was the destruction of the wall which put the first wedge into the Pepper Street security, and that security was so fragile that, once jarred, it shivered into fragments in a matter of weeks.
The solution to this problem is to push through and work anyway. Just do a terrible job if necessary, but make it clear to your brain that putting up token objections isn’t enough to give it a rest. If you do this enough, your brain will actually stop trying to sabotage you, and you’ll find that you don’t get tired when you work, crave sweets when you try to avoid unhealthy foods, or feel like a victim when you should be critically assessing yourself and planning.
The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old:.
Dry leaves rustled up against the walls and skittered away. It was that time of year when it could be hot or cold from day to day; it was neither summer nor fall. An in-between, liminal time. A border.
Gods wanted belief, not rational thinking. Building the temple first was like giving a pair of wonderful shoes to a man with no legs. Building a temple didn’t mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.
Calculated acts of sabotage requires a large network or culture of saboteurs, which indicates why the Russian sabotage did not work: rather than functioning together as a cohesive, machine-like system they permitted each other their own individual pace for operating.
The fanatic’s mindset: Kill them all and let God sort them out – I’ve got no worries where I stand with the Lord.
That’s partly because, as social psychologists have found in decades’ worth of studies, high achievers usually take too much credit for their successes and assign too much external blame for their failures. It’s a type of attribution bias that protects self-esteem but also prevents learning and growth. People focus on situational factors or company politics instead of examining their own role in the problem.
Grace turns pennies into gold, pebbles into pearls, sickness into health, weakness into strength, and needs into abundance.
I am the creator of my destiny.