In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.
There is no other teacher but your own soul.
My countrymen should have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and minds like thunderbolt.
My child, what I want is muscles of iron and nerves of steel, inside which dwells a mind of the same material as that of which the thunderbolt is made.
There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle.
The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.
Bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.
I feel like I've survived so much, and been through so much. And sometimes I miss the innocence of those times. Life was different. New York was different. The music business was different. I miss the simplicity of it, the naivete of everyone around me.
The world is very disparate, in terms of the US using the most energy per person, and then the other rich countries - Europe, Japan, New Zealand - using about half of what we do, and then the world average being about a fifth of what we use, with China just now surpassing the world average.
We Christian writers must paint evil with the blackest of brushes, not to sow fear, but to call out the monsters to be scattered by our light. If Satan cloaks himself as an angel of white, intent on deceiving the world, any attempt on our parts to minimize evil is only complicit with his strategy. . . Turn to the light; don’t fear the shadows it creates.