I have started to think that the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock.
Barefooted workers would take apart, bit by bit, the dying ships with their bare hands, shipyard in Gaddani, Pakistan. On their shoulders, workers bore great metal plates to their destination. People complain about their crappy lives working in an air conditioned work place, imagine having this as your only option in life.
That every man after the life in the world lives to eternity, is evident from this, that man is then spiritual, and no longer natural, and that the spiritual man, separated from the natural, remains such as he is to eternity, for man's state cannot be changed after death.
He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.
In every instance when my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based institutions, to charities and to community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives.
I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
You don't tell someone who's mentally ill or struggling, who's having a low time in their lives, to harden up, because it doesn't work.
My sister and I are both diagnosed with second-hand smoke syndromes. We have never smoked, but we grew up with second-hand smoke our entire lives.
They say cats have nine lives. I've had 12 already and I don't know how many more I'll have.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days - with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents - I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through.
We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so.
Life is not a competition with others. In its truest sense it is a rivalry with ourselves. We should each day seek to break the record of our yesterday. We should seek each day to live stronger, better, truer lives; each day to master some weakness of yesterday; each day to repair past follies; each day to surpass. . . ourselves. And this is but progress.
Never curse a fall. The ground is where humility lives.
Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by acceptance. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.
. . every single corner and aspect of our lives, every single choice, will be different if we take the invitation of this [Rumi's] poetry to act from the Divine Center of Silence and allow the glory of the Presence to soak our every movement.
All you have to do is speak up. Tell him straight up: "I need you here to protect and provide for us, to give us security in our lives, to help raise these children, to set an example for this boy, who needs to see what real men do, and for this girl, who needs to know what a real man is so she can find one of her own someday. I need you to be the head of this family. " Lay it out like this, and your requirements will trump his mother's every time.
Your spirit lives on in your work. YOU decide what manner of work that will be.