Brian Griffith > Brian's Quotes

“Pets, he says, are trapped in a state from which there is no escape. “Domestication has essentially created a mentally disabled child bred to be dependent on us. My dogs will never get to the point where they’ll become wolves and live the way they’re supposed to live.” We wonder why our pets are neurotic, he says, why dogs chew themselves raw and cats shred the drapes. “It’s because they’re not supposed to be living with us. They exist in this netherworld between humans and animals.”
― David Grimm, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs

“Whenever you’re filled with attractive energies, the goodness of life will feel pulled in your direction and, in time, will draw near enough to share its blessings with you.”
― Bobbie Merrill, Compelling Conversations with Dolphins and Whales in the Wild: Vital Lessons for Living in Joy and Healing Our World

“This pattern seemed to offer those being rebuffed an opportunity to become more conscious of what quality in them might be unattractive to the dolphins, a quality they would benefit from correcting.”
― Bobbie Merrill, Compelling Conversations with Dolphins and Whales in the Wild: Vital Lessons for Living in Joy and Healing Our World

“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Let loving kindness and friendship flow from your heart toward all things in the same way the sun shines everywhere without discernment. Not only is this ability in dolphins the source of their magic, but the friendship they offer makes life on this planet considerably more joyful.”
― Bobbie Merrill, Compelling Conversations with Dolphins and Whales in the Wild: Vital Lessons for Living in Joy and Healing Our World

“No matter your background, race, or circumstances, the Real You is perfect, and you must come to realize that, learn to love yourself, and understand that you do not need anything beyond yourself to be content. As you will see, you are All-That-Is. Nothing actually exists beyond yourself.”
― Stephen Hawley Martin, Enlightenment & Peace Can Be Yours Today, Prosperity May Take a Little Longer

“Matthew 18:3, (NIV), "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
― Stephen Hawley Martin, Enlightenment & Peace Can Be Yours Today, Prosperity May Take a Little Longer

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
― Stephen Hawley Martin, Enlightenment & Peace Can Be Yours Today, Prosperity May Take a Little Longer

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional, flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into ...”
― Anne Lamott

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. ”
― Martin Heidegger

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
― Howard Zinn

“When we start to ask ourselves, “Does it matter?” we realize how many aspects there are to every situation. We begin to appreciate how interconnected we are to the rest of the world, and how even our thought patterns can lead to a whole series of consequences”
― Pema Chödrön, Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”
― The Dalai Lama

“In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a people who survived the hulls of slave ships, survived the chains, the whips, the months laying in their own shit and piss. The human beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this built language and honored God and created movement and upheld love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”
― Cornel West

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Galula had noted that counterinsurgency is only 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—politics mostly, but also economics, development, and information operations.”
― John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

“We ought not to do to our future selves what it would be wrong to do to other people.”
― Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons

“What am I more than elaborate sentience?”
― Derek Parfit, On What Matters

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.”
― Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons

“Books are portals for the imagination, whether one is reading or writing, and unless one is keeping a private journal, writing something that no one is likely to read is like trying to have a conversation when you’re all alone. Readers extend and enhance the writer’s created work, and they deepen the colors of it with their own imagination and life experiences. In a sense, there’s a revision every time one's words are read by someone else, just as surely as there is whenever the writer edits. Nothing is finished or completely dead until both sides quit and it’s no longer a part of anyone’s thoughts. So it seems almost natural that a lifelong avid reader occasionally wants to construct a mindscape from scratch after wandering happily in those constructed by others. If writing is a collaborative communication between author and reader, then surely there’s a time and a place other than writing reviews for readers to 'speak' in the human literary conversation.”
― PJ O'Brien

“Don’t spend a lot of time imagining the worst-case scenario. It rarely goes down as you imagine it will, and if by some fluke it does, you will have lived it twice.”
― Michael J. Fox, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future...: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned

“I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point.”
― Joanna Penn

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“If I want to define myself, I first have to say, “I am a woman”; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex