16 quotes found
"Go at it boldly, and you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid."
"I was to see myself as God's Self-Expression working with others who were also His Self-Expression to the same extent as I. It was in the fact of our uniting together to produce His Self-Expression that I was to look for my security. No one could effectively work against me while I was consciously trying to work with God. Moreover, it was probable that no one was working against me, or had any intention of working against me, but that my own point of view being wrong I had put the harmonious action of my life out of order. Suspicion always being likely to see what it suspects the chances were many that I was creating the very thing I suffered from. This does not mean that in our effort to reproduce harmonious action we should shut our eyes to what is evidently wrong, or blandly ignore what is plainly being done to our disadvantage. Of course not! One uses all the common-sense methods of getting justice for oneself and protecting one's own interests. But it does mean that when I can no longer protect my own interests, when my affairs depend upon others far more than on myself — a condition in which we all occasionally find ourselves — I am not to fret myself, not to churn my spirit into nameless fears. I am not a free agent. Those with whom I am associated are not free agents. God is the one supreme command. He expresses Himself through me; He expresses Himself through them; we all."
"My small experience in the conquest of fear can be condensed into these four words: Calmly resting! quiet trust! That amid the turmoil of the time and the feverishness of our days it is always easy I do not pretend. Still less do I pretend that I accomplish it. I have said, a few lines above, that I tried. Trying is as far as I have gone; but even trying is productive of wonderful results."
"You are the architect of your own destiny; you are the master of your own fate; you are behind the steering wheel of your life. There are no limitations to what you can do, have, or be. Except the limitations you place on yourself by your own thinking."
"You have within you the potential to accomplish wonderful things with your life. Your greatest responsibilities are to dream big dreams, decide exactly what you want, make a plan to achieve it … take action every single day in the direction of your dreams and goals, and resolve to never, never, never give up. When you take these actions, you put yourself on the side of the angels. You become unstoppable and your success becomes inevitable."
"Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?”"
"In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole."
"A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence."
"I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times."
"I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people... that shadow land between self and reality."
"The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive."
"I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript."
"Full interview with Wallace Shawn"
"We are quite warranted in imaging Tiruvalluvar, the thoughtful poet, the eclectic . . . pacing along the seashore with the Christian teachers, and imbibing Christian ideas, tinged with the peculiarities of the Alexandrian school, and day by day working them into his own wonderful Kurral . . . the one Oriental book much of whose teaching is an echo of 'the Sermon on the Mount'."
"Christian influences were at the time at work in the neighbourhood, and that many passages are strikingly Christian in their spirit. I cannot feel any hesitation in saying that the Christian Scriptures were among the sources from which the poet derived his inspiration."
"For example, Christian historian Stephen Neill rejects Pope’s fraudulent claim with a tone of empathy: ‘The brilliant imagination of Dr Pope has produced a beautiful romance. The sober verdict of historical judgment must be that any such Christian influence on Tamil literature is unlikely. . . Any extensive infiltration of Hindu thought by Christian influences must be ruled out as no more than remote possibility. Here, as elsewhere, what we seem to see is devout minds in different places working on similar problems and arriving independently at comparable results.’"