Encounters Quotes - Page 24

• The greatest contribution we can make to the wellbeing of those in our lives is to have peace in our own hearts. When our hearts are filled with gratitude and our minds are brimming with enthusiasm, everyone we encounter leaves our space feeling a little bit lighter than when they entered it.

  David Simon

  Gratitude, Heart, Space

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• Larry Grobel's interviews are informative and insightful without being pandering or intrusive. You get the sense at all times of both intelligence at work-the interviewee's and Grobel's-both inspired by the encounter.

  David Duchovny

  Insightful, Interviews, Inspired

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• While I am writing about the details of my own intimate encounters and journeys in America and the Far East.

  Frederick Lenz

  Writing, Journey, America

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• Many people who help me encounter a lot of resistance from other people and from forces.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, People, Resistance

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• In 1911 the little town of Nakhla in Egypt was the scene of one of the most remarkable events in historym when a chunk of rock fell from the sky and killed a dog. This is the only known canine fatality caused by a cosmic object. Improbably though this encounter was already, its truly extraordinary nature was revealed only decades later when scientists found that the culprit was not a common-or-garden meteorite, but a piece of the planet Mars.

  Paul Davies

  Dog, Garden, Rocks

  Paul Davies (2015). “The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life”, p.205, Simon and Schuster

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• If you go to a higher place of power, you can gain power there and you might even encounter some beings of knowledge and light that might aid you in some way.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Light, Might

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• After my engagement with Muslim friends, I pray more than I used to pray. My prayer life has been enriched by my encounter with some Muslims, encouraged by their devotion and also enriched by the ways in which they pray. Have I compromised in this way at all? No, to the contrary, I've gone deeper in my faith and I think my love for God has been deepened and made more intelligent in a sense, more rich by that very encounter.

  Miroslav Volf

  Prayer, Intelligent, Thinking

  "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly" with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. September 19, 2008.

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• Today is [the feast of] Santa Rita, Patron Saint of impossible things - but this seems impossible: let us ask of her this grace, this grace that all, all, all people would do good and that we would encounter one another in this work, which is a work of creation, like the creation of the Father. A work of the family, because we are all children of God, all of us, all of us! And God loves us, all of us! May Santa Rita grant us this grace, which seems almost impossible. Amen.

  Pope Francis

  Children, Father, Impossible Things

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• I always notice the dysfunctional dynamic of human relationships because most places where you encounter it, people are trying to pretend it isnt happening.

  Sophie Hannah

  People, Trying, Humans

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• We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?

  Geoffrey Hill

  Real, Self, Ordinary Days

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• Everything you encounter is your life.

  Kosho Uchiyama

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• Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Use, Conversation

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• There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

  Honore de Balzac

  Book, Thinking, Skeletons

  Honore de Balzac (2009). “Eugenie Grandet”, p.5, The Floating Press

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• Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Beautiful, Simple, Reality

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• The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Ocean, Storm, World

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• I look at problems as opportunities and use every person, every incident, and every encounter as an opportunity to show a more loving part of myself.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Opportunity, Looks, Use

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• A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

  Katherine Paterson

  Children, Mean, Unique

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• The soul may be compared to a field of battle, where the armies are ready every moment to encounter. Not a single vice but has a more powerful opponent, and not one virtue but may be overborne by a combination of vices.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Powerful, Army, Soul

  Oliver Goldsmith (1825). “Miscellaneous works”, p.189

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• Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

  Adrienne Rich

  Self, Numbness, Despair

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• All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.

  Marya Mannes

  Sex, War, Compassion

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• You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.

  Erica Jong

  Confidence, People, Needs

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• Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions.

  Margaret Mead

  Men, Hands, Differences

  Margaret Mead (1963). “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”

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• When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Letting Go, Hope, Circles

  Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005). “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life”, Hyperion

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• the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Turning Points

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1915). “The Bent Twig”

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• It is too early to feel fear of the future when one is under 30, and too late after that. What I mean is that one must never allow fear to become one's permanent sense of life. The important thing is to prepare yourself intellectually to deal with whatever circumstances you may encounter, which requires that you define your values fully, clearly and rationally -- and never betray them.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Important, Too Late

  Ayn Rand (1997). “Letters of Ayn Rand”, p.673, Penguin

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