Grasping Quotes - Page 2

• One of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do.

  Timothy Keller

  Bible, Christian, Religious

  Timothy Keller (2008). “The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith”, p.22, Penguin

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• Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.

  Thomas Paine

  Government, Hands, Taxation

  "Rights of Man, Part 2". Book by Thomas Paine. "Introduction", en.wikisource.org. 1792.

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• So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow. Usually we assume we must grasp in order to have that something that will ensure our happiness. [...] Learning to live is learning to let go.

  Sogyal Rinpoche

  Inspiring, Letting Go, Order

  Sogyal Rinpoche (2009). “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller: Revised and Updated Edition”, p.40, Harper Collins

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• Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Liberty, Arbitrary

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.69, Knopf

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• We need to learn to let go as easily as we grasp and we will find our hands full and our minds empty.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Letting Go, Hands, Mind

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• When I put my pen to a blank sheet, black isn’t added but rather the white sheet is deprived of light. [] Thus I also grasped that the empty spaces are the most important aspect of a typeface.

  Adrian Frutiger

  Light, White, Space

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• There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream.

  Louis Aragon

  Dream, Reality, Mind

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• The next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering—yours, mine, and that of all living beings.

  Pema Chodron

  Change, Encouraging, Spiritual

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• You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Talking, Voice, Listening

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• I take the seashell from my jeans pocket and rub my fingers across its silken, indented surface, shallow as my own open hand. This chalice, subtly shaped by some divine intelligence to allow water to flow in and out with ease, is what I aspire to become: a vessel through which feelings can pour in and spill right out again, without all the grasping and holding that obstructs the flow. Can I be as serene and simple as this bleached shell, rubbed smooth by wind and water, receiving and releasing, filling and emptying and filling again, eternally receptive to the currents of life?

  Katrina Kenison

  Simple, Hands, Wind

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• I'm grasping with how you do something on a large scale with multiple operations and not have quality decrease.

  David Chang

  Quality, Scales, Decrease

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• I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).

  Robert Adams

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Essence

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• Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.

  Paulo Freire

  Reading, Soul, Walking

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• The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are. To follow a path with heart, we must understand the whole process of making war within ourselves and without, how it begins and how it ends. War’s roots are in ignorance. Without understanding we can easily become frightened by life’s fleeting changes, the inevitable losses, disappointments, the insecurity of our aging and death. Misunderstanding leads us to fight against life, running from pain or grasping at security and pleasures that by their nature can never be satisfying.

  Jack Kornfield

  Running, Pain, Disappointment

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• He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Stupid, Romance, Heartless

  W. Somerset Maugham (2016). “Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics)”, p.471, Diversion Books

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• In the field one has to face a chaos of facts, some of which are so small that they seem insignificant; others loom so large that they are hard to encompass with one synthetic glance. But in this crude form they are not scientific facts at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub specie aeternitatis, by grasping what is essential in them and fixing this. Only laws and generalizations are scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to general rules.

  Bronislaw Malinowski

  Science, Reality, Law

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• [Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

  Charles Fort

  Wise, Art, Stars

  Charles Fort (2014). “LO!”, p.5, Lulu.com

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• When I return to the world, I will be a man. I will walk among you. I will lick my lips with my small, dexterous tongue. I will shake hands with other men, grasping firmly with my opposable thumbs. And I will teach all people that I know. And when I see a man or a woman or a child in trouble, I will extend my hand, both metaphorically and physically. I will offer my hand. To him. To her. To you. To the world. I will be a good citizen, a good partner in the endeaver of life that we all share.

  Garth Stein

  Children, Men, Hands

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• Of course the world of work begins to become - threatens to become - our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.

  Josef Pieper

  World, Demand, Exclusion

  Josef Pieper (1998). “Leisure, the Basis of Culture”, St Augustine PressInc

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• Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.

  Martin Heidegger

  Dark, Despair, Example

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• If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Believe, Water, Wish

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• Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

  Roberto Bolano

  Writing, Hair, Bridges

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• As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother's fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along.

  Stephen King

  Mother, Victory, World

  Stephen King (2008). “Just After Sunset: Stories”, p.220, Simon and Schuster

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• Difficulty attracts the characterful man, for it is by grasping it that he fulfils himself.

  Charles de Gaulle

  Men, Difficulty

  "Mémoires de Guerre". Book by Charles de Gaulle, 1954.

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• There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence.

  George Orwell

  Safety, Soul, Together

  George Orwell (2001). “The Complete Novels of George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four”, p.1256, Penguin UK

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