They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.

I am the subject of depression so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to. But I always get back again by this-I know that I trust Christ. I have no reliance but in Him, and if He falls, I shall fall with Him. But if He does not, I shall not. Because He lives, I shall live also, and I spring to my legs again and fight with my depressions of spirit and get the victory through it. And so may you do, and so you must, for there is no other way of escaping from it.

THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea

It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead

He went to bed early, but could not fall asleep. He was haunted by sad and gloomy reflections about the inevitable end- death. These thoughts were familiar to him, many times had he turned them over this way and that, first shuddering at the probability of annihilation, then welcoming it, almost rejoicing in it. Suddenly a peculiarly familiar agitation took possession of him... He mused awhile, sat down at the table, and wrote down the following lines in his sacred copy-book, without a single correction.

In the isolation of his clear, cold intellect, the sceptic abides in a glacial and spectral universe. No glow from the affections lights up the frost and shadow of the grave. He feels no prophecy in the thrill of the human heart-in the incompleteness of nature. He believes merely in things tangible, and sees only in the daytime. He will not confess the authenticity of that paler light of faith which was meant to shine when the sunshine of reason falls short, and the firmament of mystery is over our heads.

Music and time have such an interesting relationship. Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life and it really is like you're still there. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.

The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less that God wishes - that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens - that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their course. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebush is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence - the fall of...leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue. Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom. That the fall of slavery is predetermined in the counsels of Omnipotence I cannot doubt; it is a part of the great moral improvement in the condition of man, attested by all the records of history. But the conflict will be terrible, and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.

The whole world will be affected when the apostles and prophets are fully restored. Their supernatural prophetic and apostolic words will signal the rise and fall of many nations and people. They will be instrumental in determining goat and sheep nations so that when Jesus Christ comes He can put the sheep nations on His right and the goat nations on His left. It will not be long until Christians realize the tremendous ways the restoration of prophets and apostles will affect them and the corporate Church.

Neil Shepard's (T)RAVEL/ UN(T)RAVEL takes us from the sublime -- Paris in Spring, sunset on Corfu -- to an unscheduled toilet stop in a Chinese desert as fellow passengers cheer. Yes, there's light at the heart of this book; but darkness too, as the world and the traveler unravel and re-ravel, fall together, come apart. Shepard proves the best sort of traveling companion -- lively, observant, incisive, eloquent, charmed by the strange and familiar, the old and new. Climb aboard these poems. Enjoy the ride.

The Bible says that God gave this earth to the sons of men ... and when [Adam] turned and gave that dominion to Satan, look where it left God. If left Him on the outside looking in ... He had no legal right to do anything about it, did He? ... He had injected Himself illegally into the earth -- what Satan had intended for Him to do was to fall for it -- pull off an illegal act and turn the light off in God, and subordinate God to himself ... He intended to get God into such a trap that He couldn't get out.

The banks themselves were doing business on capitals three-fourths of which were fictitious. This fictitious capital... is now to be lost, and to fall on somebody; it must take on those who have property to meet it, and probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe, have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of the debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind.

At this time of crisis we cannot be concerned solely with ourselves, withdrawing into loneliness, discouragement and a sense of powerlessness in the face of problems. Please do not withdraw into yourselves! This is a danger: we shut ourselves up in the parish, with our friends, within the movement, with the like-minded... but do you know what happens? When the Church becomes closed, she becomes an ailing Church, she falls ill! That is a danger. . . .A Church closed in on herself is the same, a sick Church.

In Hamburg the waiters always had Preludin - and various other pills, but I remember Preludin because it was such a big trip - and they were all taking these pills to keep themselves awake, to work these incredible hours in this all-night place. And so the waiters, when they'd see the musicians falling over with tiredness or with drink, they'd give you the pill. You'd take the pill, you'd be talking, you'd sober up, you could work almost endlessly - until the pill wore off, then you'd have to have another.

I love secrets. Here's a bunch of people who think they know each other over a long period of time. And they do. And they don't. Secrets aren't the same thing as shame, but they can fall in that category. I'm very interested in the ways that people are open and honest with one another and simultaneously in hiding. What we know about those we love is only part of the story. Who do we protect with our secrets? Others? Ourselves? These are questions that interest me in fiction. The public and the private self.

A leaf that falls into a stream (or a leaf we intentionally drop into a stream) just where the water disappears into the ground...will come out again at the next opening, because the underground stream has faithfully carried it there, though during this journey it has been beyond the reach of any outside interference. In the same way, an idea that has been introduced into our minds (or that we ourselves have intentionally introduced) will produce its effects after longer or shorter subconscious development.

What is the best that lies within us? Of how much are we capable? None of us yet knows. An old Arabic legend tells of a rider finding a spindly sparrow lying on its back in the middle of the road. He dismounted and asked the sparrow why his feet were in the air. Replied the sparrow, "I heard the heavens were going to fall today." "And I suppose you think your puny bird legs can hold up the whole universe?" laughed the horseman. "Perhaps not," said the sparrow with conviction, "but one does whatever one can.

Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.

The Greeks had had vast experience in this world, their imagination had been fertile and they had created much...that, in these circumstances, they should fall in with a people imbued with a calm and sometimes stolid and bucolic certainty where its spiritual possessions were concerned, barbarians with no sculpture or breeding, necessarily tinged their contempt with impotent wrath. The inevitably logical result of this attitude on the part of the Greeks was the growth of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews.

When we shoot an arrow, we look to the fall of it; when we send a ship to sea, we look for its return; and when we sow seed, we look for a harvest; so likewise when we sow our prayers, through Christ, in God's bosom, shall we not look for an answer and observe how we speed? It is a seed of atheism to pray and not to look how we speed. But a sincere Christian will pray and wait, and strengthen his heart with promises out of the Word, and never leave praying and looking up till God gives him a gracious answer.

Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature but the real cause of lots of resistance often is that however much a team might say that it wants to change, the old assumptions are woven, invisibly, deep within the corporate culture, and from this staging ground they act invisibly to sustain the old order. Finding the assumption out and then rooting them out is a special skill. It calls for assumption hunters, I call them.

Writing about real stuff that really concerned me brought out my craft. If you're writing a story about, 'Is Lois Lane gonna figure out that Superman is Clark Kent?' - it's really hard to get involved in that on anything other than a craft level. And I'm not gonna put down craftsmanship; it is a noble enough thing to have made a table that you can pound on and it doesn't fall down. But occasionally, we might have an assignment that engages some other parts of ourselves, and those tend to be the good stories.

The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; .in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.

The man and the woman are not really two separate entities, but the personality of the man needs the supporting qualities of the woman. If those supporting qualities are not there, the man will fall apart. And the same will happen to the woman. She cannot exist only on female qualities, she needs male supporting qualities. So each human being is a composite whole of two polarities which appear opposed to each other but are not really opposed; they are basically, absolutely essential components of each other.

Look at who Trump is going out... Look at who one of his constituency groups is: white working people. Now, you might think that they work in major corporations, but these are not highly paid, wealthy people. They are the people Trump is championing. Those are the jobs that Trump is trying to save or bring back into the country, no matter who employs them. I would really guard against falling prey to any liberal criticism of conservatives and Republicans here because it's rote and it's been made for decades.

But responsibility likewise falls on the legislators who have promoted and approved abortion laws, and, to the extent that they have a say in the matter, on the administrators of the health-care centers where abortions are performed. In this sense abortion goes beyond the responsibility of individuals and beyond the harm done to them, and takes on a distinctly social dimension. It is a most serious wound inflicted on society and its culture by the very people who ought to be societys promoters and defenders.

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.

A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light.

I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and out kids do scary things and our parents get old and don’t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don’t know why it’s not more like it is in the movies, why things don’t come out neatly and lessons can’t be learned when you’re in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.

The Armful For every parcel I stoop down to seize I lose some other off my arms and knees, And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns, Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once Yet nothing I should care to leave behind. With all I have to hold with hand and mind And heart, if need be, I will do my best. To keep their building balanced at my breast. I crouch down to prevent them as they fall; Then sit down in the middle of them all. I had to drop the armful in the road And try to stack them in a better load.

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.

People who are contented and serene sleep well. They fall asleep easily, stay asleep, and wake refreshed. Conversely, people who are anxious, stressed, or depressed do not sleep well, and chronic insomnia is strongly associated with mood disorders. These are clear correlations, but what is cause and what is effect is not clear. Most experts agree that sleep and mood are closely related, that healthy sleep can enhance emotional well-being, while insufficient quantity or quality of sleep can adversely affect it.

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

My painting technique has not changed that much over time, although perhaps I am painting tighter and with more detail, in spite of a desire to loosen up and paint more expressively. One thing that has changed is my daily routine. I used to paint quite late into the night. It was a time I felt the creative spirits most active. As I have aged, my circadian rhythm has changed. I like to paint early in the day when I can avoid falling into the soul-sucking email world. Early dawn feels very similar to late night.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

Sadly, many individuals don't know where to find God, and exclude him from their lives. When spiritual needs arise, they may look to the left, the right, or round about. But looking to other people on the same level cannot satisfy spiritual shortages. When the immortal spirit is starved, hunger persists for something more filling. Even when material success comes, there is a hollow ache - if living well falls short of living worthily. Inner peace cannot be found in affluence accompanied by spiritual privation.

Beginning today, make the decision to love and accept yourself just the way you are. Say your name followed by the words "I love you" and make this your daily mantra, repeating it often, especially during times of stress. Let it be your first thought upon arising and the last you think before falling asleep at night. This simple act of self-courtship can profoundly change your world. Try it for yourself and see. Make a personal decision to be in love with the most beautiful, exciting, worthy person ever - you.

You're crying?" he said. "No, I- " I tore my gaze away. "Just dust. From the path. Simon's that way." I tried to pass him, but he stooped, trying to get a loom of my face. When I wouldn't let him, he caught my chin. I jerked back, flinching at his touch, heart thudding at it, too. I told myself Simon was wrong. I'd never be dumb enough to fall for Derek. But I had. With him so close, my stomach kept doing weird flips. It wasn't fear. It hadn't been fear for awhile. "You have been crying," he said, voice softer.

But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.

The greatest of all our human concepts is the immortality of the personality and the eternal glory of the human soul. Throughout eternity you will be yourself and I will be myself, with quickened senses amplified powers of perception, and vastly increased capacity for reason, understanding, love, and happiness, all of which are qualities we may develop now. Our machines wear out, our barns fall down, and our substance goes back to the dust, but our finest collection of personal qualities will have eternal life.

So the absurdity of happiness is that it is embarrassing to discuss or even mention, impossible to define or measure, may not be achievable at all - or, at best, only intermittently and unconsciously - and may even turn into its opposite if directly pursued, but that it frequently turns up unexpectedly in the course of pursuing something else. There is no tease more infuriating...It is tempting to forget the whole thing and simply fall back on the couch with a remote control in one hand and a beer in the other.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

The more subtle thing is more speculative. The world is well past its long-term carrying capacity for human beings living a European, much less an American, lifestyle predicated on planned obsolescence. International economic growth is largely a matter of accelerated movement of materials from mines and forests to the dump. Instead of saving and buying decent furniture we can pass on to our children, we charge our credit cards for shaped heaps of sawdust and glue that fall apart in less than three or four years.

I'm not a psychologist, and I don't know how to play a more sophisticated role than the one that I have played for quite a few years, and that is spending a lot of time with these hard-working scientists in the various fields of expertise that relate to the climate crisis, learning as fully as I can the truths they are discovering, asking them to explain it in language that's simple enough for me to understand and then use that language to convey the essence of it, and then letting the chips fall where they may.

It is understandable how some people could give way to this kind of pervasive pessimism, but we speak of a gospel which brings good tidings of great joy and this must be reflected in our lives, if we are to be believable especially as we suggest to others that there is, in fact, not only a better way, but also the way. Scriptures that speak of man as a being who "might have joy" have more impact when falling from the lips or pens of men and women whose lives give fresh evidence of the validity of that scripture.

Share This Page