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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #insp
They don’t give Olympic medals out for talking a good game. ↗
#inspirational #life-changing #mind-body-spirit #motivational #new-thought
If you don’t know your father,” Odysseus was answering in that low, calm, but fiercely firm voice of his that always seemed to carry as far as it had to, “how can you know yourself? I am Odysseus, son of Laertes. My father is a king, but also a man of the soil. When I saw him last, the old man was down on his knees in the dirt, planting a tree where an old giant of a tree had finally – cut down by his hand finally – after being struck by lightning. If I do not know my father, and his father before him, and what these men were worth, what they lived for and were willing to die for, how can I know myself?” “Tell us again about arête,” came a voice from the front row. Ada recognised the man speaking as Petyr, one of the earliest visitors. Petyr was no boy – Ada thought he was in his fourth Twenty – but his beard was already almost as full as Odysseus’. Ada didn’t think the man had left Ardis since he’d first heard Odysseus speak that second or third day, when the visitors could be counted on two hands. “Arête is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things,” said Odysseus. “Arête simply means the act of offering all actions as of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one’s life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.” A newcomer ten rows up the hill, a heavyset man who reminded Ada a bit of Daemon, laughed, and said, “How can you achieve excellence in all things, Teacher? Why would you want to? It sounds terribly tiring.” The heavy man looked around, sure of laughter, but the others on hill looked at him silently and then turned back to Odysseus. The Greek smiled easily – strong white teeth flashing against his tanned cheeks and short, gray beard – and said, “You can’t achieve excellence in all things, my friend, but you have to try. And how could you not want to?” “But there are so many things to do,” laughed the heavy man. “One can’t practice for them all. One has to make choices and concentrate on the important things.” The man squeezed the young woman next to him, obviously his companion, and she laughed loudly, but she was the only one to laugh. “Yes,” said Odysseus, “but you insult all these actions in which you do not honour arête. Eating? Eat as if it was your last meal. Prepare the food as if there were no more food! Sacrifices to the gods? You must make each sacrifice as if the lives of your family depended upon your energy and devotion and focus. Loving? Yes, love as if it was the most important thing in the world, but make it just one in the constellation that is arête. ↗
Question number 2 for week 6! The biograpghy and the character of Theresa Cameron remind me of my own story when I was trining to get my undergraduation degree. It is somehow simillar to the diffeculities and constrants I had face to get learn in the KFUPM, but in constract I had/have family support/sponser my learning expenses as schoolship. ↗
As I prepare to leave she walks with me, half deaf and blind, under several ladders in her living room that balance paint and workmen, into the garden where there is a wild horse, a 1930 car splayed flat on its axles and hundreds of flowering bushes so that her eyes swim out into the dark green and unfocussed purple. There is very little now that separates the house from the garden. Rain and vines and chickens move into the building. Before I leave, she points to a group photograph of a fancy dress party that shows herself and my grandmother Lalla among the crowd. She has looked at it for years and has in this way memorized everyone's place in the picture. She reels off names and laughs at the facial expressions she can no longer see. It has moved, tangible, palpable, into her brain, the way memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way her tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace. ↗
Nerites told her that he had fifty sisters & he, being the only son of the family, had been given the privilege of examing the genitals of each & every one of his sisters. He told her that Thetis had soft downy pubic hair & so did Amphitrite, Galatea & some others. Whilst others such as Ione, Hippothoe, Polynoe & Sao had thick coarse pubic hair. He also said that all his sisters hid little cups within the folds of their crotches & that these cups gradually filled up with Nectar when touched. ↗
