Damien > Damien's Quotes

“As we drove up, Mr. Flowers himself was sitting beneath a tree out front, having a smoke. He was a wiry old white guy with the most unusual facial hair I had ever laid eyes on. If in fact it was facial hair, because it wasn’t quite that simple. Mr. Flowers’s prodigious muttonchops, once white but now stained yellow by tobacco smoke, had somehow managed to merge with the equally prodigious yellowish-white hair sprouting from his chest. I didn’t want to stare, but they appeared to form a single integrated unit, and if so represented a bold advance in human adornment.”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal.”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“these words fit best my sense of a Higher Power: a vast, subtle energy pervading all things—a Great Spirit.”
― Kevin Griffin, One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps

“Turning our will and our lives over to this power means living in accordance with what is true; it means acting out of compassion and kindness; pursuing our noblest goals; seeking truth in all things; it means striving for perfection of heart and mind while bowing to the truth of who we are, with all our imperfections and failings.”
― Kevin Griffin, One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps

“Buddhadasa says there are two other components to God besides “nature” and the laws of nature: the responsibilities of humans in relation to the laws, and the fruits of fulfilling those responsibilities. This means that if we make certain choices, we will get certain results. If we align ourselves skillfully with the Law of Karma, we will have pleasant results—the fruits. In the Steps, this is what is meant by “the care of God.” This is not a God who takes care of us just because he’s a nice guy. It’s far more impersonal than that. Instead, we fulfill our karmic responsibilities, and we receive the karmic results. Every”
― Kevin Griffin, One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps

“As I described in Step Two, my first understanding of God came with my Catholic upbringing. God was apparently a man—or looked like a man—and was kind of like a combination between Santa Claus and a punishing parent: he’d give you great stuff sometimes if you asked for it, and smack you down if you broke one of his Commandments. He seemed a little irrational. He was supposed to be loving, and yet could really make people suffer; sometimes he punished little kids for no apparent reason. Buddhadasa, the great twentieth-century Thai Buddhist master, calls this, “the God of people language,” and equates it with a childish understanding. He goes on to say that people who have this misunderstanding of God “do not yet know God in the true sense of the word, the God that is neither person, nor mind, nor spirit, but is the naturally self-existent Dhamma, or the Power of Dhamma.”
― Kevin Griffin, One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps

“Learning to live with desire may be the single most important act for an alcoholic. Our relationship to pleasure and self-gratification was distorted, and until it becomes relatively balanced, we will suffer, just as the Buddha said.”
― Kevin Griffin, One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps

“the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Our boundaries are blurred when our desire to be loved and needed by others seduces us into becoming overly involved in their lives. Or when we find ourselves overly committed with tasks and social engagements—even ones we enjoy. We must remember we need time alone, time for the stillness within to nurture us.”
― Karen Casey, In God's Care: Daily Meditations on Spirituality in Recovery

“Honesty does not mean saying all we think or feel. Many of our thoughts and feelings are only with us for a minute. They are not always the truth.”
― Anonymous, Keep It Simple: Daily Meditations for Twelve Step Beginnings and Renewal

“Gratitude for the many blessings that recovery has brought even further heightens our enthusiasm for living.”
― Karen Casey, In God's Care: Daily Meditations on Spirituality in Recovery

“It’s tricky business trying to place blame. For when we judge someone else’s behavior, we quickly come into conflict with our own.”
― Karen Casey, In God's Care: Daily Meditations on Spirituality in Recovery

“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. —Henri J. M. Nouwen”
― Anonymous, Touchstones: A Book of Daily Meditations for Men

“Love is the essence of life. If there is a purpose for living, it is this, the finding and creating of love. We are creatures of love, our natural state. We find much pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment in giving and accepting love.”
― Karen Casey, In God's Care: Daily Meditations on Spirituality in Recovery

“You will hurt people. You will hurt, and you will be hurt. However, you will also love, and you will be loved in the most magnificent ways. To live life is to understand that together these extremes thrive within us — our heart is both a blessing and a blade. To put our soul into the hands of someone who could wound it or heal it is quite possibly the most courageously beautiful risk we take. It is like looking someone right in the eye and saying “You may hurt me, but you may also love me, and I am willing to take that chance. I am willing to trust.”
― Bianca Sparacino, Seeds Planted in Concrete

“One day you will meet someone who crashes into your bones like a wildfire, setting your heart ablaze, and together you will burn and spark and love until you wake up one morning beside the ashes of what was. However, it won’t end there – for just as wood still holds an ember long after a blaze, you will always taste forest fires in the back of your throat whenever you hear their name.”
― Bianca Sparacino, Seeds Planted in Concrete

“You wake up every single day with the opportunity to start feeling again.”
― Bianca Sparacino, Seeds Planted in Concrete

“When we are numbed by the constant inflow of sense experiences that our culture provides, it can become hard to feel anything more than superficially.”
― Kevin Griffin, Recovering Joy: A Mindful Life After Addiction

“Free” is a special price, and there has been all sorts of psychological research showing that people don’t act rationally around it. We overestimate the value of free. We consume more of something than we should when it’s free. We pressure others to consume it. Free warps our normal sense of cost vs. benefit, and people end up trading their personal data for less than its worth.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient. The truth is, though, that people aren’t given much of a choice. It’s either surveillance or nothing, and the surveillance is conveniently invisible so you don’t have to think about it. And it’s all possible because US law has failed to keep up with changes in business practices. Before 1993, the Internet was entirely noncommercial, and free became the online norm. When commercial services first hit the Internet, there was a lot of talk about how to charge for them. It quickly became clear that, except for a few isolated circumstances like investment and porn websites, people weren’t willing to pay even a small amount for access. Much like the business model for television, advertising was the only revenue model that made sense, and surveillance has made that advertising more profitable.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Governments almost never admit to hacking each other’s computers. Researchers generally infer the country of origin from the target list.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“In his sobering book Sabbath, the minister and author Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, “I am so busy.” “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,” Muller writes, “as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character … To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we’re done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning. There is a whole group of people—judging from the 2016 U.S. election—who “did not join the labor market at age twenty thinking they were going to have to do lifelong learning,” added Teller, and they are not happy about it.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it. Our”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Time spent outdoors has a wonderful way of teaching us what we perceive is important and it puts our lives into perspective, reminding us of how little we need to be content”
― Keith Foskett, Balancing on Blue: A Dromomaniac Hiking

“Washington’s reputation as the most dangerous small mountain in the world is well founded. Even calm days with clear blue skies can, in a short space of time, descend rapidly into fierce winds, with temperatures plummeting to below freezing. Inexperienced and experienced hikers alike regularly get blown off course. Resisting the urge to battle the gales, they succumb to them and end up disorientated and lost, miles from anywhere. Often on day hikes with no equipment, they die from exposure and hypothermia. It is not a mountain to be taken lightly. Unofficial”
― Keith Foskett, Balancing on Blue: A Dromomaniac Hiking

“fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google. Bypassing”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind