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1 " The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law. "
― Fulton J. Sheen
2 " The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face that does not exist anymore, speaks a name – Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave – which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, “Gee, listen to this–’On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves–’” The Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you anymore.And perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moonflower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant. The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he hasn’t the slightest concern with calculating his interest or your virtue. He doesn’t give a damn, for the moment, about Getting Ahead or Needs Must Admiring the Best, the two official criteria in adult friendships, and when the boring stranger appears, he puts out his hand and smiles (not really seeing your face) and speaks your name (which doesn’t really belong to your face), saying, “Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy! "
― Robert Penn Warren , All the King's Men
3 " There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery storewith a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sackthat should have been bagged in double layers—so that before you are even out the dooryou feel the weight of the jug draggingthe bag down, stretching the thinplastic handles longer and longerand you know it’s only a matter of time untilbottom suddenly splits.There is no single, unimpeachable wordfor that vague sensation of somethingmoving away from youas it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the wordI would like to use to describe standing on the streetchatting with an old friendas the awareness grows in me that he isno longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,a person with whom I never made the effort—until this moment, when as we say goodbyeI think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reachedthe end of a pretense, though to tell the truthwhat I already am thinking aboutis my gratitude for language—how it will stretch just so much and no farther;how there are some holes it will not cover up;how it will move, if not inside, thenaround the circumference of almost anything—how, over the years, it has given meback all the hours and days, all theplodding love and faith, all themisunderstandings and secretsI have willingly poured into it. "
― Tony Hoagland
4 " Eradication represents a complete change of philosophy and a recognition of the equal rights of all citizens to protection from infection, no matter where they live. Eradication, by its very nature, is public health with a conscience. The public health control officer can sleep tranquilly, salving his conscience with the thought that most of his responsibility has been discharged – that he did not have enough money to do any more. The eradicator knows that his success is not measured by what has been accomplished but, rather, is the extent of his failure indicated by what remains to be done. He must stamp out the last embers of infection in his jurisdiction. His slogan must be: ANY IS TOO MANY. "
― ,
5 " The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. "
― Steven Pinker , The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
6 " The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which...lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life. "
― Alain Daniélou , Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus
7 " In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses. "
― Joseph Campbell , The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87 (Collected Works)
8 " There is a 'movement' of meditation, expressing the basic 'paschal' rhythm of the Christian life, the passage from death to life in Christ. Sometimes prayer, meditation and contemplation are 'death' - a kind of descent into our own nothingness, a recognition of helplessness, frustration, infidelity, confusion, ignorance. Note how common this theme is in the Psalms. If we need help in meditation we can turn to scriptural texts that express this profound distress of man in his nothingness and his total need of God. Then as we determine to face the hard realities of our inner life and humbly for faith, he draws us out of darkness into light - he hears us, answers our prayer, recognizes our need, and grants us the help we require - if only by giving us more faith to believe that he can and will help us in his own time. This is already a sufficient answer. "
― Thomas Merton , Contemplative Prayer
9 " Stillness offers an experience of being and a recognition that being . . . my essence . . . is a part of all Being, all Essence. "
10 " Ironically, we may discover that death meditation is not a morbid exercise at all. Only when we lose the use of something taken for granted (whether the telephone or an eye) are we jolted into a recognition of its value. When the phone is fixed, the bandage removed from the eye, we briefly rejoice in their restoration but swiftly forget them again. In taking them for granted, we cease to be conscious of them. In taking life for granted, we likewise fail to notice it. (To the extent that we get bored and long for something exciting to happen.) By meditat- ing on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life. "
― Stephen Batchelor
11 " This cry for mercy is possible only when we are willing to confess that somehow, somewhere, we ourselves have something to do with our losses. Crying for mercy is a recognition that blaming God, the world, or others for our losses does not do full justice to the truth of who we are. At the moment we are willing to take responsibility, even for the pain we didn't cause directly, blaming is connected into an acknowledgement of our own role in human brokenness. The prayer for God's mercy comes from a heart that knows that this human brokenness is not a fatal condition of which we have become the sad victims, but the bitter fruit of the human choice to say " No" to love. "
12 " When one takes into account also His reiterated assertions about His Divinity - such as asking us to love Him above parents, to believe in Him even in the face of persecution, to be ready to sacrifice our bodies in order to save our souls in union with Him - to call Him just a good man ignores the facts. No man is good unless he is humble; and humility is a recognition of truth concerning oneself. A man who thinks he is greater than he actually is is not humble, but a vain and boastful fool. How can any man claim prerogatives over conscience, and over history, and over society and the world and still claim he is 'meek and humble of heart'? But if He is God as well as man, His language falls into place and everything that He says is intelligible. But if He is not what He claimed to be, then some of His most precious sayings are nothing but bombastic outburts of self-adulation that breathe rather the spirit of Lucifer than the spirit of a good man. What avails Him to proclam the law of self-renouncement, if He Himself renounces truth to call Himself God? Even His sacrifice on the Cross becomes a suspect and dated thing, when it goes hand in hand with delusions of grandeur and infernal conceit. He could not be called even a sincere teacher, for no sincere teacher would allow anyone to construe his claims to share the rank and the name of the Great God in heaven. "
― Fulton J. Sheen , Life of Christ
13 " No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, " I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me." This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God's compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression. "
14 " A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, isone of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But anexcessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem andperhaps of our capacity to grow and to act. "
― Harold S. Kushner , When Bad Things Happen to Good People
15 " Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion.The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day.Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997 "
16 " Only by honoring the greater truths (the macrocosmic truth) may we begin to honor our subjective truths (our microcosmic truth). This is a recognition of the greater mystery of life and a deep honoring of being a child of that great mystery. In that profound recognition rests the awareness that the same macrocosmic mystery is within us, and it manifests and takes its course in many ways. When we simply recognize this fundamental aspect of the nature of existence, we can begin to understand its presence in our lives. And then finding ourselves moving away from the career or relationship we thought we’d be in for the rest of our life is less of a shock or a “something must be wrong” and more of a deep, humble sigh of “alright, okay, here we go, and so it is.” This is the way life moves. We do not hold the reins, and to feign so creates only pain. Evolution necessitates change. "
― Tehya Sky , A Ceremony Called Life: When Your Morning Coffee Is as Sacred as Holy Water
17 " But are the twin souls destined to be together? Synchronicity is at work here to bring the two back together again. How entrancing to find the same magical alchemy still at work, just as it was at the first meeting – a recognition of a deep rooted love so entrenched and so accepted, it could only have been forged in other lifetimes together. And probably that is what love at first sight is, recognition of an ancient love. "
18 " A life of hospitality begins in worship, with a recognition of God's grace and generosity. Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a response of love and gratitude for God's love and welcome to us. "
19 " Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love. "
― , Conversations with Robert Graves
20 " So what is transgressive in the practice of this secret Tantra is the gesture not to elide the difference that women present. What does this mean? That women represent not merely objects, property, or the possibility of sexual gratification, but an opening point to the possibility of difference as the subjectivity of the other. . .Rather, a recognition of the difference women present offers the possibility of a choice not to objectify women. This recognition recodes gendered relations inscribing woman discursively in the place of the subject. "
― , Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra
