Caleb Fleming > Caleb's Quotes

“Shall man’s basest desires receive the fullest measure of gratification, and his purest aspirations starve for lack of sustenance?”
― Og Mandino, University of Success: From the bestselling author of The Greatest Salesman in the World

“The thoughtless, the ignorant, and the indolent, seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves, talk of luck, of fortune, and chance.”
― Og Mandino, University of Success: From the bestselling author of The Greatest Salesman in the World

“Another Japanese study in humans from 2013 found that mouthbreathing delivered a disturbance of oxygen to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with ADHD. Nasal breathing had no such effects.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“Dr. Christian Guilleminault, a sleep researcher at Stanford, found that children who experienced no apnea events at all—only heavy breathing and light snoring, or “increased respiratory effort”—could suffer from mood disorders, blood pressure derangements, learning disabilities, and more.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“There’s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’s functions with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’s called nadi shodhana—in Sanskrit, nadi means “channel” and shodhana means “purification”—or, more commonly, alternate nostril breathing.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“Catlin realized that nobody really knew about the Mandan, or other Plains tribes, because no one of European descent had bothered to spend time talking to them, researching them, living with them, and learning about their beliefs and traditions.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“Nobody seemed to get sick, and deformities and other chronic health problems appeared rare or nonexistent. The tribes attributed their vigorous health to a medicine, what Catlin called the “great secret of life.” The secret was breathing.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“After several rounds of deep breaths to open my rib cage, Martin asked me to start counting from one to ten over and over with every exhale. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10—then keep repeating it,” she said. At the end of the exhale, when I was so out of breath I couldn’t vocalize anymore, I was to keep counting, but to do so silently, letting my voice trail down into a “sub-whisper.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“How could inhaling smaller amounts of air and having more carbon dioxide in our bloodstream increase oxygen in our tissues and organs? How could doing less give us more?”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapor. The rest is sweated or urinated out. This is a fact that most doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“The yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths,” wrote B. K. S. Iyengar, an Indian yoga teacher who had spent years in bed as a sickly child until he learned yoga and breathed himself back to health. He died in 2014, at age 95.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“It’s much more common, especially in the modern world, to never experience full-blown, life-threatening stress, but to never fully relax either. We’ll spend our days half-asleep and nights half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about Tummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her 1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa, few doctors and medical researchers believed the stories.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“Once a day, they were to lie down, take a brief inhale, and then exhale to a count of 6. As they progressed, they could inhale to a count of 4 and exhale to 8, with the goal of reaching a half-minute exhale after six months of practice.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“More than sixty years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests,” wrote Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi. “Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“most of the world believes that most of what actually happens, happens without our being able to see it. That’s a religious mainstay.”
― Ted Dekker, Black

“But the Great Romance is the root of our stories, stories that confront us with the eternal ideals. Love. Beauty. Hope. The greatest gifts. The very heart of Elyon. Do you understand?” “Um . . . actually it sounds a bit abstract.” “Ha! The opposite, Thomas! Do you know why we love beautiful flowers? Because we love beauty!”
― Ted Dekker, Black

“And to understand how love unfolds, you must understand how Elyon loves.”
― Ted Dekker, Black: The Birth of Evil

“TODAY Today I’m flying low and I’m not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I’m taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I’m traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

“I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

“The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

“He was bitten with the bug. His curiosity was turning. His desire was outpacing his satisfaction. He’d gone to the Crossing because he was tired of not knowing. Well, now he knew, all right. The only question was, How much knowledge would suffice? And for how long?”
― Ted Dekker, Black

“it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

“Morton Kelsey wrote, “The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

“Children contrast with the rich man simply because there is no question of their having yet been able to merit anything. Jesus’ point is, there is nothing that any of us can do to inherit the kingdom. We must simply receive it like little children. And little children haven’t done anything.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

“If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

“Was it this novel that inspired Erma Bombeck to write a column entitled “If I Had My Life to Live Over Again”? In it, she wrote: I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded. I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains. I would never have bought anything just because it was practical, wouldn’t show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime. When my child kissed me impetuously, I would never have said, “Later. Now get washed up for dinner.” There would have been more I love yous, more I’m sorrys, but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute, look at it and really see it, live it, and never give it back.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

“I have operated on dozens and dozens of people to improve deficient features only to find that, after surgery, they replaced this real physical fault in their minds with a nonsensical belief which continued their unswerving fixation on their inferiority. Their negative beliefs varied; their movement toward failure was the same kind of mechanism.”
― Og Mandino, University of Success: From the bestselling author of The Greatest Salesman in the World