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101 " Hip-hop is a reflection of your surroundings and an instrument of change. - Esme from Sister Mischief "
102 " If we're talented at music, that talent is of god. If something makes our heart sing, that's god's way of telling us its a contribution he wants us to make. Sharing our gifts is what makes us happy. We're most powerful and god's power is most apparent on the earth when we're happy. A course in miracles teaches that we are only truly happy when we're doing god's will. The only thing to be saved from is our own negativity and fear. The crux of salvation in any area is a shift in our sense of purpose. That shift is a miracle, as always we consciously ask for it: 'Dear god, please give my life some sense of purpose. use me as an instrument of your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to you. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. "
― Marianne Williamson , A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"
103 " Happiness is just a state of mind, you don’t need any artificial or superficial matter to experience happiness. I believe that happiness is an instrument to cope and an instrument to change this world full of troubles. When you stop labelling happiness to a goal or an artificial or superficial matter you will be happy. "
104 " You often say ; I would give , but only to the deserving, The trees in your orchard say not so , nor the flocks in your pasture.Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and nights is worthy of all else from you.And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream. See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver , and an instrument of giving.For in truth it is life that gives unto life-while you , who deem yourself a giver , is but a witness. "
105 " Who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving. "
― ,
106 " For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to " give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of the mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. "
107 " You put your camera around your neck in the morning along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange ('Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life' by Milton Meltzer) "
108 " A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazis, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more " advanced" than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done. "
109 " Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a person courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole person, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more refined instrument for the search and communication of truth…. "
― Pope Pius XII
110 " When a baronet is discovered behind a bush in the park with a guardsman, or a minister of the crown is caught creeping out of a country with his socks stuffed full of bank notes and a woman not his wife ten paces behind, or a public person is revealed disporting himself with a couple of tarts and a teddy bear in West Paddington, they complain to the press that the outcry is hypocritical and that everyone would like to do what they were doing if only they had the chance. They regard the law as an instrument of envy, like nationalization and death duties. "
― Alice Thomas Ellis , The Sin Eater
111 " I lost the most precious thing a man can have: my faith in my fellow man. I laughed and I wept at God's irony, at the absurd way he had chosen to demonstrate to me that I was an instrument of Good and Evil. "
112 " There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter innocence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability to change his fate. Terror, however, is only in the last instance of its development a mere form of government. In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. The point for the historian is that the Jews, before becoming the main victims of modern terror, were the center of Nazi ideology. And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily. "
― Hannah Arendt , The Origins of Totalitarianism
113 " What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful! "
― Saul Bellow , Humboldt's Gift
114 " In the third place he comes on to the chiefe Organ, that is, the instrument wherewith they should sing. It is not with the Organs of the Papists, no not with thy tongue; but it is with the heart, and with the affection of a well-ruled heart. Therefore as a fiddler, or any that playes on an Instrument tempers his Instrument, that a sweete harmonie may be heard of it: Even so before thou sing, temper thou thy heart; and let thy song rise, not from thy throte, but from the depth of thine heart, that is from thine affections set upon God. "
115 " You must never lose the awareness that in yourself you are nothing you are only an instrument. An instrument is nothing until it is lifted. "
116 " Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself. "
117 " War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. "
― Thomas Jefferson
118 " Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. "
― May Sarton
119 " Talent is required, but much of writing is a matter of craft, which develops with time, attention, patience and practice, like playing an instrument or learning to dance. "
120 " If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice. "
