omniviolet > omniviolet's Quotes

“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“The secret of enlightenment is the absolute, unequivocal conviction that it exists.

What does that mean? It means you have discovered an unshakable confidence in the fact of nonduality—in the perennial mystical revelation that IT IS . . . and I AM THAT. A confidence in that which can never be seen or known is the very ground of the enlightened state. Being is ungraspable, it’s unknowable, it’s ever elusive, and yet it is the only place you can find true confidence in life. Why? Because it is the very source of life itself.

The conscious experience of Being, which is what enlightenment is, has always been the ultimate answer to the most fundamental spiritual questions: Who am I? and Why am I here? Those who have tasted enlightened awareness find that in that experience, any trace of existential doubt and all the questions that go along with it instantaneously disappear. It’s not even that they are answered, but rather, the questions lose their meaning. When you locate the nonrelative, or absolute, nature of consciousness in the depths of your own self, it is experienced as a clarity that is empty of content; a weightiness that is full of nothing in particular; a profound knowing that dissolves all questions. In that questionless state, you find yourself profoundly rooted and radically free, supported by an absolute confidence in the knowing of no-thing that changes everything. The experience of that empty ground is the answer—the one answer that always liberates each and every one of us. You simply know, unequivocally, before thought, that I am. That’s the only answer: I AM. There is no why.”
― Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening

“What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?

You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.”
― Temple Grandin, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.”
― Temple Grandin

“I am different, not less.”
― Temple Grandin

“I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.”
― Temple Grandin

“I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.”
― Temple Grandin

“If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is part of what I am.”
― Temple Grandin

“In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism

“But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

“I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

“Animals make us Human.”
― Temple Grandin

“[T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

“Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

“The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

“There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals – A NYT Bestseller on the Emotional Needs of Dogs, Cats, Horses, and Zoo Creatures

“If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.”
― Temple Grandin

“The world needs all types of minds.”
― Temple Grandin

“My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“Children who are visual thinkers will often be good at drawing, other arts, and building things with building toys such as Legos.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“In a noisy place I can’t understand speech, because I cannot screen out the background noise.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“Neither living nor learning was good without order.”
― Temple Grandin

“Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise.”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals – A NYT Bestseller on the Emotional Needs of Dogs, Cats, Horses, and Zoo Creatures

“There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

“My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“When something is "all in your mind," people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

“What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

“One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t.”
― Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum