Powerful quotes
6.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"One very powerful and effective way to work with this tendency to push away pain and hold on to pleasure is the practice of tonglen. In tonglen practice, when we see or feel suffering, we breathe in with the notion of completely feeling it, accepting it, and owning it."
"Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves."
"It's very powerful if you can home in on, and really trust, intuition and its strength. Most men have shunned that in so many ways that they end up squaring off the circle of life."
"In the literary as well as military world, most powerful abilities will often be found concealed under a rustic garb."
"Every time the industry gets powerful, and corporate thinking dominates what the music is, then the music really pales."
"I really don't know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them I think, 'That's really a better meaning than I thought, and perfectly valid, given the words that exist.' So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them, and they might be more powerful than the ones I'm thinking."
"Justice Stevens is one of those who are most sensitive to the least powerful in our society."
"The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry."
"There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe."
"Ridicule is about the most powerful weapon possible."
"In an era when too many Americans are losing their jobs or working for less, trying to make ends meet, in close cases Judge [Samuel] Alito has ruled the vast majority of the time against the claims of the individual citizens. He has acted instead in favor of government, large corporations and other powerful interests."
"If we cannot be powerful and happy and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves."
"For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship."
"In a normal democracy, you protect the individual from the excessive power of the state. In Turkey, power elites try to protect the state - as if this state were fragile and needed protection - when in fact, it's too powerful already."
"I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth."
"One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia" - the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn't mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of the novel as a space that can bring all these languages together - not just aggregate them, like the Internet is so good at doing, but bring them into a dialogue."
"If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary and eternal life force that surges and ebbs around us all the time? Apparently not. Because we have stopped paying attention."
"He was powerful and I died of love in his shadow."
"How attraction works, making one's body almost painfully alive and one's thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters."
"The first person I learned I could make happy with laughter was my mother, whom I idolize. It was a powerful thing to realize. I knew I had found my life's work."
