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1 " How sweet is the assurance, how comforting is the peace that come from the knowledge that if we marry right and live right, our relationship will continue, notwithstanding the certainty of death and the passage of time. Men may write love songs and sing them. They may yearn and hope and dream. But all of this will be only a romantic longing unless there is an exercise of authority that transcends the powers of time and death. "
― Gordon B. Hinckley
2 " Waiting is an exercise of faith that demonstrates the condition of our hearts. Waiting on God is an act of faith. And faith is what separates the men from the boys. "
3 " Why Dream?Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams. "
― S.A.R.K. , Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day
4 " Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities... "
― Raymond Tallis
5 " His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter! "
― Roberto Bolaño , 2666
6 " Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. "
― Philip Gourevitch , We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
7 " Thinking is an exercise of an imaginative mind to empower dreams and desires. "
8 " Tears streamed down her wrinkled face. This world that she had longed to change for the better was as bad as the one into which she had been born. " An exercise in futility," she murmured. "
9 " Life isn't intended as an exercise in taking it easy. "
― Steven Redhead , Life Is A Cocktail
10 " All acts of sex were forms of degradation.... What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme? "
― Chris Kraus , I Love Dick
11 " One important aspect of justice, Jose Miranda reminds us, involves the restoration of what has been stolen. Giving food to the hungry or clothing to the naked is not a charitable handout but an exercise in simple justice - restoring to the poor what is rightfully theirs, what has been taken from them unjustly. "
― Robert McAfee Brown
12 " No one goes through this life unscathed. No matter what one sees in other people's lives that might seem better than one's own, that's only on the surface. No one knows what goes on beneath. Envy is an exercise in futility, since not one person gets out of this life alive. "
13 " Is there plenty of celebration in your life? How about your spiritual life? Is it an exercise in following rules and practices? Or does it look more like a joyous celebration? "
― Steve Goodier
14 " A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians.In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence. "
― , Entheogens, Society and Law: The Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility
15 " It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy. "
― Isaac Asimov , Foundation's Edge (Foundation #4)
16 " The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain. "
― , The Palace
17 " ...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as " the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come. "
18 " But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. "
― Marcel Proust , Swann's Way
19 " Being extra nice to someone can be a form of manipulation--kindness is an exercise of power in its own right. "
― Wang Anyi , The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai
20 " Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are. "
― Meghan Daum , The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion