Patterns In Life Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Patterns In Life Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
So many stories lived behind my eyes. I carried the people I hurt, the lies I told, my sick relationship with food, wherever I went. My mind was rarely grounded in the moment. My past was heavy and constant; my thoughts wouldn't leave me alone. But when I was with the shelter dogs, I didn't have anything to hide. Sometimes what existed behind my eyes fell away. I wasn't bulimic or unlovable or fat or a liar. I was a part of life again. I was an observer, and to more than just the dark cyclical patterns of the mind - here was the strong, sturdy presence of another - the breath moving in and out of Angel's chest, the beating of her heart, the force of life moving through her and through me.— Shannon Kopp
The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don't bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing - Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don't agitate my home. There's room for all of us in this neighborhood.— Elizabeth Gilbert
We live in a world of shadow and light, pain and joy. We spend our entire lives investigating the many possible patterns of human experience including interactions between humankind and nature and with one another. We must learn from our chronicles and assist future generations by living a fully engaged life attempting to ascertain how to live in an authentic and joyous manner.— Kilroy J. Oldster
Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns - whatever it is for you - live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person.— Tullian Tchividjian
Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all.— Jeanette Winterson
This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.— Anna Smaill
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.— Neil Gaiman
The key to maturity is time and community. Discernment and godly wisdom develop in a community that spans generations. The church is called to be this place where the [God's] Spirit uses normal patterns and rhythms of the Christian life in a community, so that we may bear fruit like a well-watered tree. Despite common appearances, the church is the place where God's new creation is coming into existence and being sustained by the Spirit like a great vineyard.— Michael Horton
We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior. Mothers cannot make children think, feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior. We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck. At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves - or within the child or the child's father, for that matter. There is never one villain in family life, although it may appear that way on the surface.— Harriet Lerner
In meditation, you are moving closer and closer to yourself, and you begin to understand yourself so much more clearly. You begin to see clearly without a conceptual analysis, because with regular practice, you see what you do over and over and over and over again. You see that you replay the same tapes over and over and over in your mind. The name of the partner might be different, the employer might be different, but the themes are somewhat repetitious. Meditation helps us to clearly see ourselves and the habitual patterns that limit our life.— Pema Chodron
Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open - not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.— Elizabeth Lesser
What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a natural mechanism, a force no different in origin from gravity or magnetism?— Dean Koontz
It was curious how life seemed to weave a pattern that was not in the least haphazard, as it so often seemed to be.— R. F. Delderfield
From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.— Luke Rhinehart
Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we're doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don't recognize them when we look into mirrors.— James Sallis
The second primary objective of a curriculum for Christlikeness is to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of "enslavement" (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action. These are the "automatic" patterns of response that were ground into the embodied social self during its long life outside The Kingdom Among Us. They make up "the sin that is in my members" which, as Paul so brilliantly understood, brings it about that "wishing to do the good is mine, but the doing of it is not" (Rom. 7:18).— Dallas Willard
Because of reasons they were just beginning to understand, that one small shift in Lisa's perception that day in Cairo -the conviction that she had to give up smoking to accomplish her goal- had touched off a series of changes that would ultimately radiate out to every part of her life.— Charles Duhigg
When researchers began examining images of Lisa's brain, they saw something remarkable: One set of neurological patterns -her old habits- have been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new urges. As Lisa's habits changed, so had her brain.
It would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.— Ernst Cassirer
It's a complete life change when you really want to better yourself and completely change the patterns that you have had in the past. Do I think I still need work? I think everyone needs work. I just keep working on myself.— Demi Lovato
When the blood in your body is— Yrsa Daley-Ward
weary to flow,
when your bones are heavy though
hollow
if you have made it past thirty
celebrate
and if you haven't yet,
rejoice. Know that there is a time
coming in your life when dirt settles
and the patterns forma picture.
Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.— Rainer Maria Rilke
Such is my relationship with God: on my gigantic canvass of life, I am the one throwing all of the brightly-colored paints, creating genuine splatters, authentic whirlpools of color, beautiful patterns, wonderful streaks and stains and wild accents; God is the one with the paintbrush who stands beside my canvass filling all the intricate and amazing details in between the whirlpools and the streaks! We're happy together!— C. JoyBell C.
There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme— Jacqueline Carey
I have come to believe that we do not walk alone in this life. There are others, fellow sojourners, whose journeys are interwoven with ours in seemingly random patterns, yet, in the end, have been carefully placed to reveal a remarkable tapestry. I believe God is the weaver at that loom.— Richard Paul Evans
I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live ... The great secret ... is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life - the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one's life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really.— Marsden Hartley
If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves.— Jonathan Hale
Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means that led to everything else, whether you're blessed or cursed or both. Trace it back far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The patterns of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers.— Rebecca Solnit
Those who romanticize war often like to think of it, at least in areas of mortal peril, as nothing but "guts and glory." Those who are inclined to pacifism, by contrast, often think of it as an unbroken sequence of horrors. Actually, however, people in wartime still fall in love, do the laundry, worry about pimples, drink beer, and do most of the same things that they do in times of peace. The patterns of daily life may be mundane, but they are remarkably tenacious.— Boria Sax
But, while people in wartime still go about their daily routines, the prospect of imminent death can give even quotidian chores a heightened intensity. When the first bombs were dropped on London in autumn of 1940, the population bore adversity better than almost anybody had expected. The danger was mixed with excitement, and the terror had a sort of apocalyptic magnificence.
The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex.— Stephen Baker
realized that I had the power to change my life if I was willing to change my thinking and release the patterns that kept me living in the past.— Louise L. Hay
When you cause something to happen it causes a shift in your awareness. Shifts in your awareness ultimately will result in a pattern shift in your life.— Frederick Lenz
Just the way sound creates visible waves as it travels through a droplet of water, our "belief waves" ripple through the quantum fabric of the universe to become our bodies and the healing, abundance, and peace-or disease, lack, and suffering-that we experience in life. And just the way we can tune a sound to change its patterns, we can tune our beliefs to preserve or destroy all that we cherish, including life itself.— Gregg Braden
Being responsible is taking ownership of your life. It means you have taken the first radical step to becoming a complete human being - fully conscious and fully human. In taking responsibility and beginning the journey toward conscious living, you are putting an end to the age-old patterns of assigning blame outward or heavenward. You have begun the greatest adventure life has to offer: the voyage inward.— Sadhguru
It's possible to find order in chaos, and it's equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They're like a set of twins who like to swap clothing from time to time. Order and chaos frequently intermingle and overlap, the same as beginnings and endings. Things are often more complicated, or more simple, than they seem. Often it depends on your angle. I think that telling a story is a way of trying to make life's complexity more comprehensible. It's a way of trying to separate order from chaos, patterns from pandemonium.— Gavin Extence
The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are like snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, ( ... ) but still unique.— Neil Gaiman
I am— Jiddu Krishnamurti
asking myself what is fear not what I am afraid of.
I lead a certain kind of life; I think in a certain pattern; I have
certain beliefs and dogmas and I don't want those patterns of
existence to be disturbed because I have my roots in them. I don't
want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state
of unknowing and I dislike that. If I am torn away from everything
I know and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of
things to which I am going. So the brain cells have created a
pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which
may be uncertain. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is
what I call fear.
Naturally there is reincarnation ... otherwise life would be pretty dull. All the patterns in this lifetime are results from patterns in other lifetimes.— Frederick Lenz
Watch, become alert, observe, and go on dropping all the reactive patterns in you. Each moment try to respond to the reality - not according to the ready-made idea in you but according to the reality as it is there outside. Respond to the reality! Respond with your total consciousness but not with your mind. And then when you respond spontaneously and you don't react, action is born. Action is beautiful, reaction is ugly. Only a man of awareness acts, the man of unawareness reacts. Action liberates. Reaction goes on creating the same chains, goes on making them thicker and harder and stronger. Live a life of response and not of reaction.— Osho
We deal with so many nightmares on a regular basis. When I'm watching a horror movie, there's a pattern, a sense of control in them. I'm just an observer, not having to deal with any of the repercussions. It's a nice dream to think monsters play by the rules, that they've got a pattern you can unlock and follow. Real life's messy, and the chaos leaves you devastated in the wake.— Katherine McIntyre
People tend to set themselves up in patterns; something happens, it hurts them, then something similar happens, and - it's happened again! It seems much bigger then, and they get worried and go through life looking for that thing, and because they're so concerned and looking for it, when anything that happens resembles that thing, they're sure it's happening again. So sometimes people think things are repeating even when they're not.— Mary Gaitskill
No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods - come and gone with the sun.— Zadie Smith
Everything in your life, every experience, every relationship is a mirror of the mental pattern that is going on inside of you.— Louise Hay
In the second training, we develop energy, concentration, and mindfulness. These are the meditative and life tools that enable us to awaken. Without them we simply act out the patterns of our conditioning.— Joseph Goldstein
Unlike traditional nursing homes, Green House homes provide elders with a high quality of life and quality of care in a setting that feels like a real home. By altering the facility size, interior design, staffing patterns and service-delivery method, the Green House model provides residents better, safer and more personalized care.— Risa Lavizzo-Mourey
They'll tell you who they think you should be— Nikki Rowe
they'll even try to manipulate you into believing it but let me tell you something son, if I listened to who I was supposed to be - this, everything we are and do wouldn't be in existence. Be a leader, find yourself and make a life with it. Those who judge you and try to force the patterns of their beliefs onto you are envious they haven't the strength in themselves to do the same.
All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.— David Eagleman
The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.— Donna Tartt
A lack of dopamine makes your emotions harder to control or regulate. There are more feelings of sadness and even depression. Other symptoms can be procrastination, less motivation, lack of interest in life, different sleeping patterns, restless leg syndrome, mood swings, fatigue, feelings of guilt or despair, a bad memory, lower focus, addiction to caffeine or other substances, or obesity.— V. Noot
Change is not always easy when patterns in our lives have existed so long.— Lolly Daskal
Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms. Experience that never disappoints or saddens or stirs up feeling is a bland experience with little challenge or variation of color. Perhaps it's when we experience confidence and faith and hope that we see materialize before our eyes this builds up within us a feeling of inner strength, courage, and security. We are all personalities that grow and develop as a result of our experiences, relationships, thoughts, and emotions. We are the sum total of all the parts that go into the making of a life.— Virginia Mae Axline
The evidence here, as elsewhere, suggests that education is certainly relevant, but more because better education is associated with general differences in patterns of life than because discrete parts of a lifestyle can be changed. Health-change policies which focus entirely on the individual may be ineffective not only because exposure to health risks is largely involuntary, but also, as this study has shown, because of unwarranted assumptions about the extent to which behaviour can, in these circumstances, be effective in improving health.— Mildred Blaxter
The Conservative Mind describes a cast of intellect or a type of character, an inclination to cherish the permanent things in human existence. On many prudential questions, and on some general principles, conservatives may disagree from time to time among themselves; so this book offers a certain diversity of opinions. Yet the folk called "conservative" join in resistance to the destruction of old patterns of life, damage to the footings of the civil social order, and reduction of human striving to material production and consumption.— Russell Kirk
Taoism, on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.— Alan W. Watts
It shouldn't be difficult, then, to make the transposition at this point into the early Christian vision of Jesus and the Spirit and the way in which the material world is both celebrated and renewed through their work. The Jewish basis for the early Christian patterns of belief and behavior is clear. It is important that God's people are embodied, because God made this world and has no intention of abandoning it. The material of creation is a vessel made to be filled with God's new life and glory, even though the transformation may involve suffering, persecution, and martyrdom.— N. T. Wright
Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis.— Peter Sloterdijk
In this life, y'ever notice that you face the same challenges again and again? We all do. They're challenges to your soul. We repeat them until we face them and master them. Yes we all have free will, but there're divine patterns out there, and the battle is to see them.— Brad Meltzer
He felt oddly powerless, as if his entire life were in the fingers of two faceless players maneuvering pieces in the same patterns on some vast board in a game that, for all he knew, had lasted for eternity.— David Eddings
Perhaps the single most powerful event facing humanity today is a great awakening on a planetary scale that has been millennia in the making. We humans are in the midst of a profound advance as a species to a higher form of global consciousness that has been emerging across cultures, religions and worldviews through the centuries. This awakening of global consciousness is nothing less than a shift, a maturation, from more egocentric patterns of life to a higher form of integral and dialogic patterns of life.— Ashok Gangadean
The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our "inner eye" as such.— Sebastian Marincolo
People say I have a wild imagination. I don't. You see, what I do consists in analyzing the patterns of peculiar stupidity that emerge from their head, the same patterns that make their life boring and dramatic, full of problems and stress, and then recombining that into a beautiful multicolored ball that I throw back at them in the form of a joke or a lie that makes them laugh. But I didn't really create it; I merely gave use to their own nonsense.— Robin Sacredfire
A Nasrudin 'joke' may at first seem unfunny, or pointless, but will after study change and begin to reveal itself: you have uncovered the first level of meaning, and will soon observe your thought patterns shift as you watch them; you will have made the first crack in the wall of assumptions, the conditioned thinking (designated 'The Old Villain') which imprisons each and every one of us, the worst of which is to think that the visible world is all there is, that a man's or a mouse's view of life is the true one.— Doris Lessing
His new life required no great change in the patterns of his behaviour. It was merely an adjustment. He had always known how to make himself invisible.— Christopher Fowler
Reflecting on various aspects of our lives is essential for a person to grow and adjust to changing phases in their life. Self-analysis entails examining a person's existing level of self-esteem and documenting the inner voice that speaks to a person, which is frequently either affirming of self-defeating. Failure to periodically engage in self-analysis, make crucial revisions in our personas, and modify our thinking patterns when we encounter transformative events in life can lead to mood disorders, burnout, and other emotional maladies.— Kilroy J. Oldster
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe— David Byrne
but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry
poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs
is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
Above a certain size and level of prosperity, regional cities in Japan look alike. To discover what makes each one different, one has to sample the food and the sake, and stay long enough to see the patterns of life under the surface. Otherwise it can be hard to tell them apart. Wealth tends to smooth out the differences in the way people live. Life becomes standardized.— Miyuki Miyabe
Only in nature, in the mountains and valleys beyond the hand of man, are the real differences, the real uniqueness, preserved. There is something about the air in Hokkaido, a kind of richness that will never change. For better or worse, the only thing that really changes is people.
This chapter provides a comprehensive definition of life scripts as a complex set of unconscious relational patterns based on physiological survival reactions, implicit experiential conclusions, explicit decisions, and/or self-regulating introjections, made under stress, at any developmental age, that inhibit spontaneity and limit flexibility in problem-solving, health maintenance and in relationship with people.— Richard G. Erskine
The genius of the Gospel was that it included the problem inside the solution. The falling became the standing. The stumbling became the finding. The dying became the rising. The raft became the shore. The small self cannot see this very easily, because it doubts itself too much, is still too fragile, and is caught up in the tragedy of it all. It has not lived long enough to see the big patterns. No wonder so many of our young commit suicide. This is exactly why we need elders and those who can mirror life truthfully and foundationally for the young. Intimate I-Thou relationships are the greatest mirrors of all, so we dare not avoid them, but for the young they have perhaps not yet taken place at any depth, so young people are always very fragile.— Richard Rohr
That is why in adult life, people generally tend to relive rather than live, that is, to repeat the patterns of the past and defend the primary fantasy in the defiance, and avoid the real gamble or real adventure of taking a chance on something new. They are afraid that if they really cry out, if they really ask, if they really scream for help, that it won't come, and they'll be in the same panicky frightened state they were in when they were little.— Robert W. Firestone
One of Freud's most important insights is that human beings have a strong unconscious tendency to retain these patterns during their lifetime, recreating over and over again the characteristic experiences of their inner world, whether they be positive or negative. Regardless of the discomfort or dysfunction they may cause, these experiences are reassuringly familiar, having been laid down early in life.— Catherine Sandler
Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.— Edgar Friedenberg
People look for patterns in everything. It's what keeps us sane, I suppose. I struggle to see any patterns in my life. I think I can understand depression a bit because of my sister. My own feelings of ... I'm aware that, if you feel down, it can be strangely unrelated to circumstances around you. That's just the way life is.— Michael Palin
There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns. [ ... ] A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet?— John Stuart Mill
After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change.— Ram Dass
We try to see patterns, to judge the events in our lives as rewards or punishment, parse things into good and evil. But there is a randomness to life that is beyond analysis...— William Eisner
I am pretty relentless about exercise. I love working out and doing cardiovascular workouts. I'm now doing the Whole Life Challenge to discover the unhealthy patterns in my diet and to adjust them to more reasonable levels. And more yoga!— Tim Matheson
I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.— Carl Jung
You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that changes will flow naturally.— Henepola Gunaratana
Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.— Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns.
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence - or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.— Arthur C. Clarke
A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It's good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they're reinforcing patterns.— Charles Duhigg
If I die, don't take this too hard," she counseled them, "death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.— Louise Erdrich
The game created a parallel world, Sidney thought. It was drama; it was excitement; it was a metaphor for the vicissitudes of life. It was also quintessentially English: democratic (there were teams with all levels of ability), communal (the cricket 'square' was often at the centre of the village green), and convivial (the game was full of eccentric characters.) It was the representation of a nation's cuisine, with its milky tea, cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sponge and lashings of beer. It was also beautiful to watch, with fifteen men, dressed in white and moving on green, creating geometrical patterns that looked as if they had been choreographed by a divine choreographer. As— James Runcie
Human life cannot be formless. We live by patterns. We move in comradeships. Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu - and a recognizable part - unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return. The sensible thing is to use hard thinking to find the right way to live and then to live that way. What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear.— Herman Wouk
Change, even if unwelcome, forces us to reevaluate what our best options are. Those times of transitions are great opportunities to look for recurring patterns in your life and make adjustments to build on the good and reduce the bad.— Dan Miller
Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom.— Timothy Keller
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.— Carl Jung
Your life moves in patterns toward things, and things that we achieve finally are part of this mosaic. I just think that we create our own fate.— Arne Glimcher
Although healing brings a better life, it also threatens to permanently alter life as you've known it. Your relationships, your position in the world, even your sense of identity may change. Coping patterns that have served you for a lifetime will be called into question. When you make the commitment to heal, you risk losing much of what is familiar. As a result one part of you may want to heal while another resists change.— Laura Davis
Courage to Heal Workbook by Laura Davis
I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.— Vladimir Nabokov
Sometimes we get stuck in patterns or reoccurring themes in our lives that require a shocking epiphany to give us the opportunity to see new possibilities and notice the obstacles that keep us from moving on.— Kat Lahr
People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind's powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?— Lidia Yuknavitch
When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing, ... not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you ... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.— Paul E. Miller
It is easy to surround yourself with people who think in the same ways, believe the same ideas, and live life in similar patterns. Many communities are made up of the same kind of people to the extent that we intentionally have to seek people whose stories are completely different from ours.— Holly Sprink
Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.— Eckhart Tolle
One of the most profound changes in my life happened when I got my head around the relationship between gratitude and joy. I always thought that joyful people were grateful people. I mean, why wouldn't they be? They have all of that goodness to be grateful for. But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged: Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us. People were quick to point out the differences between happiness and joy as the difference between a human emotion that's connected to circumstances and a spiritual way of engaging with the world that's connected to practicing gratitude.— Brene Brown
Don't let the urgent take the place of the important in your life ... When you and I were putting out the fires of the urgent, the important was again left in a holding pattern.— Charles Hummel
I do my work easily and joyously. I feel beauty all around me and I see beauty in everyone I meet, for I see God in everything. I recognize my part in the Life Pattern and I find harmony through gladly and joyously living it. I recognize my oneness with all mankind and my oneness with God. My happiness overflows in loving and giving toward everyone and everything.— Peace Pilgrim
If I were a pattern, I would be the pattern of paint that a bird would make if you dipped a bird's wings in watercolour and then set the bird loose inside a paper lantern. I'm pretty sure that's it!— C. JoyBell C.
But here in the open air, this naked, solitary fiddle began a rhythm that played havoc with time, making patterns that set you to moving and told your heart it had been beating the wrong way all your misspent life.— Kristen D. Randle
While we all grow and mature and change from that awkward little worm we were in high school, it is still a pretty consistent indicator of who we become as adult butterflies. High school sets a tone for how the next decade of your life plays out, good or bad. It is the first set of steps in your journey. If you want to know who you were as a person during this hormonal time, refer to your yearbook. You will find a theme and you will see a pattern. Most definitely, you will notice these themes and patterns carried on into your twenties and so on. Take those signatures serious.— Jennie Hoffer
