Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One of Still Lifes many achievements is its paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness. Alexander Longs visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets" are simultaneously meditative and alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book.
The hardest achievement in acting - in my opinion, anyway - is nailing a role that absolutely nobody else could have played. Pacino owned Michael Corleone... but DeNiro could have owned it as well. Who else, though, but Val Kilmer could have nailed Jim Morrison? Does anyone besides Will Ferrell pull off Ron Burgundy?
Immediately after 11 September, the U.S. closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the 'war on terror.' In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.
The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined.
I always liked my teachers, and I was in a lot of after-school projects. I was a Girl Scout until my senior year, when I couldn't be a Girl Scout anymore. I was in clubs like Junior Achievement, and I ran track and field. My grades were good, but then toward 11th grade they were nothing. I always went to summer school.
There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.
KGB was inseparable part of the Soviet Union and the whole structure of the Soviet society. We believe that the achievements of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet society, it's main achievements until the split in 1991, it was at the same time the main achievements of the KGB, because it was working for the same cause.
I'm often asked how I define "success." It's an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things - achievement and appreciation. One isn't enough: Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable. Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.
Education is about inviting every single person who enters a school to realize his or her relatively boundless potential in all areas of worthwhile human endeavor. It is concerned with more than grades, attendance, and academic achievement. It is concerned with the process of becoming a decent and productive human being.
Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.
When spiritual seeking becomes too complicated, its exercies too elaborated, its doctrines too esoteric, it becomes also too artificial and the resulting achievements too fabricated. It is the beginners and intermediates who carry this heavy and unnecessary burden, who involve themselves to the point of becoming neurotics.
Penance is the willingness to undergo hardships for the achievement of a good purpose. I was willing. But when hardships came I found myself lifted above them. Instead of hardship, I found a wonderful sense of peace and joy and conviction that I was following God's will. Blessings instead of hardships are showered upon me.
Love what you do, or don't do it. Don't make a choice of any kind, whether in career or in life, just because it pleases others or because it ranks high on someone else's scale of achievement...Make the choice to do something because it engages your heart as well as your mind. Make the choice because it engages all of you.
Fidel Castro outlasted U.S. presidents determined to overthrow him, survived the collapse of the communist bloc that sustained him and outlived many of those who wanted to replace him. For those reasons, he will go down in history as among the world's most skillful politicians, even if his achievements largely die with him.
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.... In the beginner's mind there is no thought, 'I have attained something.' All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. We can really learn something.
That's a fairly Wordsworthian way to look at things! But yeah, actually - part of the poet's work, I think, is to maintain or reintroduce the imaginative capacity of their earlier self while nonetheless maturing. And I do think the more successful the poet is at this particular thing, the greater their achievement as a poet.
I was desperately shy when I was wee. Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer, and I don't think the residue of that has ever gone away. I still feel the ultimate achievement would be to write a novel.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station, then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, every day.
I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery... I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.
No question that 'Birdman' is a breathtaking technical achievement, not a stunt. Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors' and the camera's movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse.
I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master in that line. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources, and in my experience I have rarely if ever met a man who achieved preeminence in money making.. certainly never one in manufacturing.. who was interested in many concerns.
Mother Teresa's detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement.
Misty Copeland is making history. During American Ballet Theatre's current season at the Metropolitan Opera House, Copeland will alight on that storied Lincoln Center stage, making her New York debut as the Swan Queen in the iconic masterpiece Swan Lake - a crowning achievement for any dancer, regardless of the color of her skin.
I do not compete with anybody else; I compete only with myself. You saw my capacity a few minutes ago. Now I am competing with myself. When I do weightlifting, my body is my world. If I can improve myself, if I can go beyond my previous achievements, then that is my goal. My own previous record is always what I am competing with.
I have to put a business model together because certain businesses are approaching me as a legend, as if I'm on my way out. Same goes for the way I get presented on the VH1 Hip Hop Honors and BET. I get lifetime achievement awards because of who I am and what I've done, but they want to put me in a place, as if I'm on my way out.
Even if feminists tear down the bogeyman patriarchy and dominate men in all areas of life, they still won't be happy because deep down, they'll know it's a false victory. Achievement obtained by lowering your opponent to your standard as opposing to rising and surpassing their standard of output isn't achievement. It's mediocrity.
We can't achieve excellence through talent alone. Or merely by making technological improvements. We can't even buy our way to excellence, no matter how much money we have available to spend. More dollars will never do it. We have to develop a strong corporate conscience. Ethical muscle. And that doesn't happen by accident either.
We in the Himalayas have the problem of glaciers melting away and we had to make our own glaciers and I don't consider them proud or great achievement. It is only mainly to adapt to the problems that we have caused in this planet; The real solutions lie elsewhere; maybe people in the big cities of India, China and US can solve it.
If there is anything the artist or a true work of art teaches us, it is that variety and complexity really increase the unity, and that to achieve unity within a great variety of complexity is a greater achievement and more satisfying piece of art than to achieve unity with just a few elements, which is relatively easily achieved.
I want to do everything, so when I started I wanted to be an actress, and I've always written funny things. I love that; it gives me a real sense of achievement and joy. I also love presenting. I'd never been interested in it before but found it pretty fun and easy, and I really enjoyed working with a group - standup is so lonely.
A strong accountability system needs to broaden, not narrow, the curriculum. That cannot happen if you only have accountability without adequate school funding. Until Tallahassee understands the need to raise the bar as well as the financial investment, Florida will continue to celebrate mediocrity at the expense of true achievement.
The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world.
'Bruce Lee' didn't work, and there were apprehensions about what the fans might say. People might have commented that Charan could have waited for some time before selecting me again. But that's what makes it a real achievement to me. People want to work with me because of the comfort level; nobody would work with you again otherwise.
In Tunisia the Americans had to pay a stiff price for their experience, but it brought rich dividends. Even at that time, the American generals showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces, although we had to wait until the Patton Army in France to see the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare.
Getting lab results to child clinicians faster compliments our Action Plan for Health Care by helping more patients get the right care, at the right time. It's quite the achievement when over two million children across Ontario will experience better and more coordinated care thanks to the work being done by SickKids and eHealth Ontario.
The major economic policy challenges facing the nation today - pick your favorites among the usual suspects of low public and household savings, concerns about educational quality and achievement, high and rising income inequality, the large imbalances between our social insurance commitments and resources - are not about monetary policy.
Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.
There is a Silence that is totally impersonal. It is not the fruit of anybody’s work. Peace is there, but there is no peacekeeper. This Peace is only known when the noise of the person is not present. In the absence of the 'person' there are no distractions. Only the ever-pure Awareness prevails. The Ultimate is nobody’s achievement at all.
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day; we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.
There's no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student's achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here's what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children's education can also make a huge difference in a student's achievement.
I'd quite like to write a book about comics, actually. But trying to write about comics as literature, which I don't think anyone's really done before. Sometimes they're more like fan books, and I'd quite like to write one about the Marvel universe over the last 50 years. It's an unprecedented achievement to create that length of continuity.
That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
Patrick White is a strongly individual, richly gifted, original and highly significant writer whose powers are remarkable and whose achievement is large. His art is dense, poetic, and image-ridden. It is always a substantial and genuine thing. At its finest it is one which goes beyond an art of mere appearances to one of mysterious actuality.
It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.
It was in Cardiff, and the cast was 60 per cent Welsh-speaking. It's the first time I've walked into a rehearsal room speaking my mother tongue, which in itself was a breath of fresh clean air from the Welsh mountains. Singing Hans Sachs is always a milestone, but I was happy to be part of such an achievement, not personally but as a company.
Just like everything else in our lives, with the good comes the bad. It applies to success as well. Success isn't a destination, it's a journey - a journey that will be sure to come with lots of great achievements and lots of setbacks. You have the power to decide if those downsides are going to define you in a negative way or a positive way.
According to Muslim teachings, God first revealed His word in the Holy Qur'an to the prophet, Muhammad, during the month of Ramadan. That word has guided billions of believers across the centuries, and those believers built a culture of learning and literature and science. All the world continues to benefit from this faith and its achievements.