Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dean Karnazes

I never feel more alive than when I'm in great pain, struggling against insurmountable odds and untold adversity. Hardship? Suffering? Bring it!

Amber Benson

Mindi Scott has a real talent for getting inside her protagonist's head. She sketches out Coley's story in grand swathes, and then paints in all the little details, so that you feel as though you are enmeshed in Coley's brain: thinking her thoughts, feeling her confusion, anger, and, in the end, pain. I just don't think it's possible to read this book and not identify with Coley in some way.

Amartya Sen

If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.

Chuck Palahniuk

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?" I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? "And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything." But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. "If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.

Chuck Palahniuk

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

Christopher Paolini

I'm not the person I once was. I have Thorn now, and... I'm not fighting for myself anymore....It makes a difference....I used to think you were a fool to keep risking your life as you have...I know better now. I understand...why. I understand...' His [Murtagh] eyes widened and his grimace relaxed, as if his pain was forgotten, and an inner light seemed to illuminate his features. 'I understand-we understand.

Christopher Moore

We know there's going to be nothing but pain, but we go back again and again.

Christopher Moore

Little-boy love...the cleanest pain I've ever known. Love without desire, conditions, or limits - a pure and radiant glow in the heart that could make me giddy and sad and glorious all at once. Where does it go? Why, in all their experiments, did the Magi never try to capture that purity in a bottle? Perhaps they couldn't.

Angelina Jolie

What is it that turns people into artists? It often comes from some kind of pain or angst, a need to understand or express something. It very rarely comes from confidence, being raised by parents who want to hear what you have to say and wants to encourage you.

Albert Bandura

Self-appraisals are influenced by evaluative reactions of others

Albert Bandura

In any given instance, behavior can be predicted best by considering both self-efficacy and outcome beliefs . . . different patterns of self-efficacy and outcome beliefs are likely to produce different psychological effects

Albert Camus

For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

Annie Lennox

You become really ugly when you become very superficial and self-obsessed.

Annie Dillard

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Clay Shirky

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

Angelus Silesius

The rose does not have a why; it blossums without reason, forgetful of self and oblivious to our vision.

Cindy Sherman

I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

Chuck Smith

God will allow us to follow self-help, self-improvement programs until we have tried them all, until we finally come to the honest confession, ‘I can't do it. I can't be righteous in my own strength!’ It is then, when we admit our utter powerlessness, that we find hope. For it is then when the Lord intervenes to do a work that we could not do for ourselves.