c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I argue here and throughout this book that if we engage students in real writing tasks and we use technology in such a way that it complements their innate need to find purposes and audiences for their work, we can have them engaged in a digital writing process that focuses first on the writer, then on the writing, and lastly on the technology” (8).
— Troy Hicks
What, then, are some of the shifts that have happened in our understanding of the composing process that make a focus on digital writing in the writing workshop that much more compelling?
— Troy Hicks
one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.
— Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
Picard only saw the movie, which had the entire Tales of the Black Starship subplot removed for time.
— Wil Wheaton, Memories of the Future - Volume 1
This practically unlimited supply of advertisers in a fluid marketplace appears to be a new economic model that may insulate Google from some of the dynamics of an economy built on mass and scarcity. Google has its own economy.
— Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World
I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.
— Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
I’m with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no – you didn’t care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re getting on.
— Philip Pullman
This was the winter of 2008/9. Work was ongoing to reinstate a tram system in the city. A lot of people couldn’t see the point of trams and many more disliked the disruption. Streets were closed off. There was almost a sense of ‘apartheid’ as the roadworks made it difficult to move from New Town to Old Town and vice versa. Added to which, the weather was fairly grim. And the banks looked ready to implode.
— Ian Rankin, The Complaints
The student asks: If my redstone necklace had every view of every veil that ever brightened, would I be wise? The master answers: If I had a thousand pieces of a priceless vase, would I be rich?
— Kay Kenyon, City Without End
Mark my words—you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current—as I am now.
— Charlotte Brontë
the pain of losing a dollar is far more powerful than the pleasure of winning a dollar.
— L. Jon Wertheim
The standard argument is that civilian deaths in Afghanistan were the regrettable consequence of military action that was needed to destroy Al Qaida bases and thus prevent further terrorist attacks. But this is a spurious argument since it is obvious that Al Qaida is a decentralised network. The counterargument – that bombing Afghanistan has made it more likely that terrorists will attack – is equally plausible. Most of the September nth hijackers were from Saudi Arabia,
— Mark Curtis
A Guardian investigation concluded that between 10,000 and 20,000 people died as an 'indirect' result of the US bombing, that is, through hunger, cold and disease as people were forced to flee the massive aerial assault. An estimate by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, suggests that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing up to July 2002.3
— Mark Curtis
1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you...
— Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
— George Orwell, 1984
WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5
— Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore.” He smiled...
— Terry Brooks, The Elf Queen of Shannara
we who determine how quickly time passes.
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
Secrecy was the problem
—  transparency the obvious cure.
solid and dense as his own, a nose ring and angelbites.
— Cherrie Lynn, Rock Me
researchers discovered that people who have just consumed caffeinated drinks were more likely to be swayed by arguments about various controversial topics.55 In short, good evidence that there really is no such thing as a free lunch or an innocent cup of coffee.
— Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot
John Andrew Holmes, “No exercise is better for the human heart than reaching down and lifting another up.
— Tim Sanders, Today We Are Rich: Harnessing The Power Of Total Confidence
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
— Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.
— Robert J. Sawyer, WWW: Wake
There’s a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography—a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It’s found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That’s certainly not what we’re after in these pages. No, we’re after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the...
— Brian D. McLaren
If you are prepared,” he told his players, “you will be confident, and will do the job.
— Tim Sanders, Today We Are Rich: Harnessing The Power Of Total Confidence
He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.
— Stephen King, The Stand
All right,” he said. “Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops.” He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. “See,” he said, “using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind’s default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis.” His chalk flew across the board again. “Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...
— Robert J. Sawyer, WWW: Watch
For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse,” and “in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26
— Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced...
— Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
And don’t miss Frank Otto, the world’s most tattooed man! Held hostage in the darkest jungles of Borneo and tried for a crime he didn’t commit, and his punishment? Well, folks, his punishment is written all over his body in permanent ink!
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins
— George Orwell, 1984
To draw close to Divinity is to come to appreciate man as a divine creation, for “If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 343).
— Robert L. Millet, Men of Valor: The Powerful Impact of a Righteous Man
Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
— John Fowles
Blame yourself when things go wrong, and give credit to others when things go right. The process of giving other people credit is what it takes to build a team.” Sandberg, one of America’s great team builders, knows exactly what it takes to win.
— Frank Luntz, Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary
Some day this war is going to end...
— Richard Stanley, Shadow of the Grail
the Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.
— Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts...
— Nic Marks, The Happiness Manifesto
at Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts. Imprisoned
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Mawu felt her face where the still-fresh scar had just been opened up again. She examined the blood on her fingers as if it weren’t her own. Sir returned to the table and a servant slipped through the side door and passed him a wet cloth to wipe the blood from his hands.
— Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench
But sometimes, talent isn't worth shit. There are tons of talentless people out there making zillions of dollars. And unfortunately, an equal number of brilliant artists whose name and voices you'll never hear. - Paul Hudson
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star
There is no Master but the Master,” he said, “and QT-1 is his prophet.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.
— Ben Goldacre
The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still...
— Seth Godin, Poke the Box
Oh, the shame that I suffer now . . . the shame of a vanquished King.” And those were the last words of Henry Plantagenet.
— Jean Plaidy, The Courts of Love: The Story of Eleanor of Aquitaine
I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all.
— Sara  Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....
— Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.
— John McPhee, Assembling California
In retrospect, I now believe this expected donation of ten percent of income to the Fellowship was based on bad exegesis of an old Jewish taxation law that Jesus Himself seemed to completely ignore.
— Dylan  Morrison, The Prodigal Prophet
Cabinet is a conscious, explicit attempt to portray the Doctor himself as myth. “He’s a mischief, a leprechaun, a boojum,” says one character, bookseller and collector of incunabula, Syme. “The Doctor is a myth. He’s straight out of Old English folklore, typical trickster figure really.”29 Neither part of an ongoing narrative, nor specifically located within the series’ past, Cabinet is in a position to challenge the portrayal of the Doctor.
— Anthony Burdge, Jessica Burke, Kristine Larsen, The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who
The message of the Nazarene had been turned into a weapon in some religious power game. 'Look how they love one another' just didn't seem an apt description of the bizarre religious theatre I'd just witnessed.
— Dylan  Morrison, The Prodigal Prophet
When I look back on my life I come to one simple conclusion: there exists an intelligent, loving Presence in the Cosmos that will ultimately have its desire for relationship with us fulfilled; even our arrogant dismissal of its existence will not stop it in its tracks. The Enlightenment's god, the great idol of free will, lies smashed in pieces in its wake. The jealous Presence patiently draws us homeward like some gigantic electromagnetic beam. The Death Star in reverse. This divinity is, I believe, the 'Abba' of Jesus, a transcendence that will not be boxed in by religious misrepresentation...
— Dylan  Morrison, The Prodigal Prophet
The central theme of the book is that prayer is best understood as a long, sometimes perilous, epic journey that eventually leads to triumph.
— Gerald L. Sittser, When God Doesn't Answer Your Prayer
Imperialism and exploitation,” he wrote, “spheres of influence, trade barriers, unequal distribution of the world's goods, starvation in the midst of plenty, slums with gold coasts next door, poverty supporting luxury: These are marks of an unChristian world.
— Sara  Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Some miners’ wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.
— John McPhee, Assembling California
The overload makes users less productive and more stressed; thus, there’s a need for some solution. Passively ignoring the problem won’t work, since bits are still heavy, even if we pretend not to notice.
— Mark Hurst, Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman. “They’re nasty bits about famous people
—  everyone will want them.
Simply read a child’s story that he or she is writing for school, and you will discover some of the inner struggles with which the young person is trying to cope.
— John S. Savage, Listening and Caring Skills in Ministry: A Guide for Groups and Leaders
mad at me. For Dad, parenting has become just like shooting one of his stupid insurance ads-some makeup to cover the blemishes, a flashy smile, and wham! He's got himself a regular picture-perfect family.
— Holly Schindler, A Blue So Dark
of their passions in the same object at that particular time.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Lobster-both-ways is popular tonight. The preparation is easy enough. Take a two-pound lobster. Kill it with a sharp chef’s knife straight between the eyes. Remove the claw and knuckle meat. Steam for five minutes, chop into salad with aioli, celery, and lots of shallots and chives. Chill. Reserve the tail until ordered. Paint with herb-infused oil, season with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, grill for two or three minutes until it’s just cooked through. Serve with spicy organic greens.
— Graydon Carter, The Hunger: A Story of Food, Desire, and Ambition
as self-knowledge develops, we begin to care more about what we think and less about what others ask of us. We
— Charles Hayes
The bigoted, the narrow minded, the stubborn, and the perpetually optimistic have all stopped learning.
— Charles Hayes
The town stood witness to her fall As she crashed to the earth Exposed and utterly vulnerable Her secret lives, lies and truths Stained her skin and lay in mounds at her feet Her foes sat in judgment as a jury, But love came . . . with gentle hands Love dried her tears Love covered her shame Love sheltered her with compassion Love accepted her anyway Love embraced her Love welcomed her home.
— Deborah Grace Staley, What The Heart Wants
because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
So this is the goal: To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
— Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Death, however clearly foretold, still came unexpectedly.
— Daniel Abraham, The Dragon's Path
Well, I don’t. Not absolutely. But adopting "making money’’ as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption. Because, for one thing, there isn’t one item on that list that’s worth a damn if the company isn’t making money.
— Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
First, love one another very deeply, and don’t be ashamed to express your love openly and often. Also, enjoy one another, and guard zealously your time together so as to enjoy it to the fullest extent.
— Laura Greenwald, Eye of the Beholder: True Stories of People with Facial Differences
that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous Swine flu.
— Stephen King, The Stand
They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town,
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
It was only later, in her new, darker rooms above the banking house, that she realized it didn’t matter how loud she screamed or how violently she wept. Her parents would never come to her because, being dead, they didn’t care anymore.
— Daniel Abraham, The Dragon's Path
such a short time. I am about to tell our barker,
— Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud
While they go get the others, I figure out the details. The system I’ve set up is intended to "process’’ matches. It does this by moving a quantity of match sticks out of their box, and through each of the bowls in succession. The dice determine how many matches can be moved from one bowl to the next. The dice represent the capacity of each resource, each bowl; the set of bowls are my dependent events, my stages of production. Each has exactly the same capacity as the others, but its actual yield will fluctuate somewhat.
— Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Living on purpose means stopping to make sure your actions still match your big goals.
— Stever Robbins, Get-It-Done Guy's 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More
Asking why you are doing something serves as a check and always moves your focus back to the big picture. Asking why helps you find out if your actions have come unglued from your goals. In theory, you could do this as often as every day, reviewing your to-do list to make sure it ties to your bigger goals. In my perfect fantasy world, I check my actions against my goals every day. In real life, once a week or once every other week is more realistic.
— Stever Robbins, Get-It-Done Guy's 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More
When you feel dissatisfied, or when you’re working too hard, the problem could be a mismatch between your goals and actions. Write out your goal ladder and make sure it all lines up. First start with your actions and ask “Why?” to find your subgoals. Keep asking why until you map up to your larger-level goals, at least two or three levels.
— Stever Robbins, Get-It-Done Guy's 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More
Categories No. 4 and No. 5: Three small cards to a straight and two small cards with an ace.
— Ray Zee, High-Low-Split Poker, Seven-Card Stud and Omaha Eight-or-better for Advan
the automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well the great majority of the time. For example, because only healthy, normal turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that single “cheep-cheep” noise.
— Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all BEGIN freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show MORE affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
our countrymen are starving, she is decorating herself with diamond aigrettes!
— Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud
customers away. The Palais-Royal has become a veritable den of iniquity,
— Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud
Look at Rose Bertin. From an ordinary seamstress to the milliner
— Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud
Many of your opponents will put a great deal of emphasis on three low cards to a straight. These hands are very strong and they do scoop a lot of pots. However, they do best in multiway pots when the cards needed to fill the open ends are very live and when these hands
— Ray Zee, High-Low-Split Poker, Seven-Card Stud and Omaha Eight-or-better for Advan
the day is all about getting connected.
— Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
Heschel calls the Sabbath a cathedral in time.
— Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people. You can’t just extract lessons from it.
— Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.
— Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
But here’s a critical point—more open decision making processes also typically require open information sharing. If you are going to involve more people in the process, they have to have the right information on which to base their decisions.
— Charlene Li, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead
this process isn’t suitable for complex decisions that have nuance, and those who use it in such situations run the risk of being perceived as rubberstamping when the decision had already been made.
— Charlene Li, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term. As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change.
— Justin S. Holcomb
To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective
I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.
— Seth Godin, Poke the Box
Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective
educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.
— Po Bronson, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
We know that to become a Christian we shouldn’t try to fix ourselves up, but when it comes to praying we completely forget that. We’ll sing the old gospel hymn, “Just as I Am,” but when it comes to praying, we don’t come just as we are. We try, like adults, to fix ourselves up. Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the nonpersonal, nonreal praying that you’ve been taught.
— Paul Miller, A Praying Life
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.
— Jane McGonigal
Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form
A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory.... Once you've said 'percentage' there's nothing more to worry about. If we had any other word... maybe we might feel more uneasy....
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Today, I look forward and I see a future in which games once again are explicitly designed to improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness.
— Jane McGonigal
I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.
— Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me
and Billy rolled in. “Thought you might like some wake-up.” Bingo,
— J.R. Ward, Crave
The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.
— Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term.39 As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change.
— Lindsey A. Holcomb
One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don’t show (because it’s difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
— Seth Godin, Poke the Box
But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.
— David Brin, The Uplift War
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form
The origins of Aragon's independent history, and of the fundamental characteristics which differentiated it so sharply from Castile, are to be found in the long struggle of medieval Spain against Islam. The Arabs had invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711, and conquered it within seven years. What was lost in seven years it took seven hundred to regain.
— J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716
The parable about the Good Samaritan tells how a Samaritan rescues a man who is mugged and beaten by robbers on the Jericho—Jerusalem road, a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. To understand how this story must have shocked the Jews, imagine someone telling a story about “The Good Nazi.” The Jews and Samaritans hated one another.
— Paul Miller, Love Walked Among Us: Learning to Love Like Jesus
Shall I count to ten and then ring a bell before I dive down between your legs?” Dustin teased and sent her a wicked smile.
— Kris Cook, Three to Play
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term.39 As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change.40
— Lindsey A. Holcomb
They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.
— Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me
I think the single most reassuring thing about doing a startup is knowing in advance how difficult it is going to be.
— Jared Tame, Startups Open Sourced
They were the supreme representatives of the Catalan nation, acting as spokesmen for it in any conflict with the Crown, and seeing that the laws or ‘constitutions’ of the Principality were observed to the letter; and at times they were, in all but name, the Principality's government.
— J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716
The kingdom of Aragon possessed an official known as the Justicia, for whom no exact equivalent is to be found in any country of western Europe. An Aragonese noble appointed by the Crown, the Justicia was appointed to see that the laws of the land were not infringed by royal or baronial officials, and that the subject was protected against any exercise of arbitrary power. The office of Justicia by no means worked perfectly, and by the late fifteenth century it was coming to be regarded as virtually hereditary in the family of Lanuza, which had close ties with the Crown; but none the less, the...
— J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716
Categories No. 1 and No. 2: Rolled-up trips and three cards to a low straight flush.
— Ray Zee, High-Low-Split Poker, Seven-Card Stud and Omaha Eight-or-better for Advan
Category No. 3: Two aces with a low card.
— Ray Zee, High-Low-Split Poker, Seven-Card Stud and Omaha Eight-or-better for Advan
Who asked them dern pigs?” he said. “I guess they tracked us,” Augustus said. “They’re enterprising pigs.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.
— Richard Rohr
Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed)—Gandalf came by.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.
— David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources Of Love, Character, And Achievement
The Power of Less is perfect for achieving goals: Limit yourself to fewer goals, and you’ll achieve more. At the same time, we’ll look at ways to narrow your focus on your projects, so that you can complete them more effectively and move forward on your goals. We’ll apply limitations to our projects to increase our effectiveness.
— Leo Babauta, The Power Of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential
Isaac Rothe, Matthias
— J.R. Ward, Crave
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. H. L. MENCKEN
— Frank Luntz, Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary
husband and my family and the better half of WriterDog. Prologue
— J.R. Ward, Crave
As the wine went down in the bottles, patriotism arose in the three men. And when the wine was gone they went down the hill arm in arm for comradeship and safety, and they walked into Monterey. In front of an enlistment station they cheered loudly for America and dared Germany to do her worst. They howled menaces at the German Empire until the enlistment sergeant awakened and put on his uniform and came into the street to silence them. He remained to enlist them.
— John Steinbeck, The Short Novels: Tortilla Flat / The Moon is Down / The Red Pony / Of Mice and Men / Cannery Row / The Pearl
All around, grown men were getting out of cars and shoving at each other like fifteen-year-olds, the bunch of juiced-up, armchair quarterbacks ready to peanut-gallery it up: The closest they were going to get to the octagon was standing on the outside of the chicken wire looking in.
— J.R. Ward, Crave
This book might also be seen as “a Christian primer.” A primer teaches us how to read. Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them. This book’s purpose is to help us to read, hear, and inwardly digest Christian language without preconceived understandings getting in the way.
— Marcus J. Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power - And How They Can Be Restored
Jake, you’re a dern grasshopper,” Augustus said. “You ride in yesterday talking Montana, and today you’re talking California.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
and, if anything, are more likely to respond assertively. (1999:106) In
— Pierangelo Isernia
What branch do you want to go in?” “I don’ give a god-damn,” said Pilon jauntily. “I guess we need men like you in the infantry.” And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. “Where do you want to go?” “I want to go home,” Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too.
— John Steinbeck, The Short Novels: Tortilla Flat / The Moon is Down / The Red Pony / Of Mice and Men / Cannery Row / The Pearl
so that it may grow fatter and
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Many programmers would prefer to mock in their client library specs, but doing so could result in the service and client passing all specs with hidden failures.
— Paul Dix
The heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing.
— Marcus J. Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power - And How They Can Be Restored
Spain, for so long a mere geographical expression, was somehow transformed into an historical fact.
— J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716
You create a file called user.rb in the /models directory:
— Paul Dix
for the service in spec/service_spec.rb, you add another describe block:
— Paul Dix
For invalid user name and password combinations, the service should return a 400 HTTP status code, which means that the server received a “bad request.” The service could also use the 401 (“unauthorized”) response code, but that code specifies that authentication credentials need to be in the request header, which is not quite what is required.
— Paul Dix
Men as a class appear to be "at risk," maybe even at high risk.
— Richard Rohr
The next step in the process is to measure the impact that these increases in reach have on your number of new transacting customers. The secret to a company’s reach strategy lies in the program’s ability not only to acquire fans, followers, subscribers and connections, but to convert them through its use of social media into transacting customers.
— Olivier J. Blanchard, Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization
However, for the purposes of migrating existing Rails applications to services, the shared database approach may be necessary in the early stages.
— Paul Dix
You see, the thing about working with pirates is that they know what they are doing. They already know more than you do because they are sailing and raiding. They are the experts in your organization, and you need to get them on your side, not turn them against you. Here is how to deal with a pirate ship model in ten simple steps: 1. Respect the pirates. (They know how to execute.) 2. Invite the pirates to the table. Recognize their wins. 3. Ask the pirates to report on what they see and hear. 4. Ask the pirates to report on their wins and losses. 5. Ask the pirates how you can help them win more....
— Olivier J. Blanchard, Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization
Ultimately, the purpose of a certification is to establish a particular level of proficiency in a discipline. Unfortunately, “social media” in and of itself, is not a discipline. Digital crisis management, on the other hand, is. So are digital customer service and online community management. This means that a certification program that focuses on social media without addressing each specific business function adapted to social media won’t end up certifying anyone in much of anything.
— Olivier J. Blanchard, Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization
international force. Finally, these issues are tackled both at the individual
— Pierangelo Isernia
Services isolated on business logic can share data sources with other systems.
— Paul Dix
Myth Number 4: Social Media Is the Shiny New Thing. Two Years from Now, That Bubble Will Burst Yes, it is the shiny new thing. No, two years from now, that bubble will not burst. There is no bubble. What social media represents is an evolution in the field of communications, just as the Internet and mobility before it. The tools will change, the platforms will evolve, but the way in which people communicate with other people through digital networks and electronic devices has been fundamentally transformed through the development of social media. We did not grow tired of the telephone, of the...
— Olivier J. Blanchard, Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization
But I’m old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he’ll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. He’ll grow exponentially until there’s nothing and no one else left. Just Ward, Ward, Ward in every house, in every town and every city, in every country in the world. Forever.
— Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by truth, as guilty of iniquity and injustice: and I abide my sentence, and so do they. These things, perhaps, ought so to be, and I think that they are for the best.
— Plato, Apology/Crito/Phaedo
Image perception makes a big difference. That's one of the things I tell entrepreneurs today. Fine, focus on products, focus on customers and all that good stuff - that's necessary. But the image that you project is also key. Don't forget that.
— Robert Jordan, How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America
Execution is everything. Even if you start a business with the wrong idea or too many competitors, you can out-execute all the better ideas in the right market.
— Robert Jordan, How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America
his had disappeared. “Did you know they have mystical powers?”  
— Desiree Holt, Emerald Green
Horror is a feeling that cannot last long
—  human nature is incapable of supporting it.
of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously. Emerald Green Desiree Holt
— Desiree Holt, Emerald Green
Where some see a new world disorder, others see the opportunity to bring organization.
— Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World
In other words, what we know for sure is entirely limited, and all the rest is basically opinion.
— Robert L. O'Connell, The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal & the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic
with few apparent connections to Afghanistan as such, but there were no calls to bomb Riyadh (imagine if the hijackers had been Iraqi). Rather, Saudi Arabia is a favoured ally in the 'war against terrorism'. It is obvious that at stake here are US geopolitical interests (discussed further below), more than concerns to prevent future terrorism.
— Mark Curtis
Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil."   "A which?"   "Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years.
— Mark Twain, Собрание сочинений в восьми томах
for my characters to endure.           Chapter
— Markee Anderson, Touchdowns And Potions
With every single fiber of her soul, she wanted to be With every single fiber of her soul, she wanted to be
— RaeAnne Thayne, Dancing in the Moonlight
Jake, anyway, and somehow that seemed far, far worse. The couldn’t
— RaeAnne Thayne, Dancing in the Moonlight
The moon was just starting to rise above the Tetons, shining
— RaeAnne Thayne, Dancing in the Moonlight
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
— Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
Andy McKnight.
— Markee Anderson, Touchdowns And Potions
or dead is coincidental. Copyright 2010 by Karen Fraunfelder Cantwell Chapter
— Karen Cantwell, Take the Monkeys and Run
a push up or two . . . or twenty.
— Karen Cantwell, Take the Monkeys and Run
Most recently, Richman et al (1997) have argued that a four-dimensional
— Pierangelo Isernia
task not unlike coming to grips with the Holy Ghost.' There
— Pierangelo Isernia
Commentary would come to life in 1945 amid widespread predictions that mass unemployment would resume as soon as war production ebbed. But it wouldn’t take long after the war to see that the dire prophecies had failed. It became clear that Western democracy was far from finished
—  American power seemed limitless.
It’s as if people used the invention
— John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.
— John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
American socialism had lost momentum even before the war. (Socialist leader Norman Thomas received 885,000 votes in his 1932 run for the presidency, but only 187,500 in 1936.)
— Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: PUBLICATION CANCELLED
The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an 'international coalition' in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain's military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was...
— Mark Curtis