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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #magi
You think it’s funny?” Shay said with annoyance. “Yes.” Her friend paused to get her laughter under control. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re the last person in the world I’d ever imagine marrying again after ol’ Mr. Flaccid Flagpole. ↗
#love #sex #imagination
Isso é mais uma coisa que aprendi com o tempo, sabe? O bem e o mal não existem! Quer dizer, existir até que existem, mas apenas no contexto de uma pergunta importante: bem ou mal para quem? A questão é que tudo depende do ponto de vista, entende, filho? Pense numa partida de futebol, por exemplo. A vitória é ótima para o time que vence, mas a mesma vitória é amarga para quem perde. Não é? Agora, imagine que jogadores dos dois times sejam entrevistados para falar da partida. Os que ganharam com certeza elogiarão a atuação do seu time, enfatizarão a importância dos pontos obtidos com a vitória. No entanto, o jogador do time que perdeu reclamará dos erros da equipe, das condições desfavoráveis do gramado, descerá o pau na arbitragem e coisa e tal. No fim, para uns o resultado terá sido justo, enquanto outros tenderão a se sentir injustiçados. As coisas são sempre assim. Nossa visão depende sempre do lado em que estamos. ↗
The months passed away. Slowly a great fear came over Viola, a fear that would hardly ever leave her. For every month at the full moon, whether she would or no, she found herself driven to the maze, through its mysterious walks into that strange dancing-room. And when she was there the music began once more, and once more she danced most deliciously for the moon to see. The second time that this happened she had merely thought that it was a recurrence of her own whim, and that the music was but a trick that the imagination had chosen to repeat. The third time frightened her, and she knew that the force that sways the tides had strange power over her. The fear grew as the year fell, for each month the music went on for a longer time - each month some of the pleasure had gone from the dance. On bitter nights in winter the moon called her and she came, when the breath was vapor, and the trees that circled her dancing-room were black, bare skeletons, and the frost was cruel. She dared not tell anyone, and yet it was with difficulty that she kept her secret. Somehow chance seemed to favor her, and she always found a way to return from her midnight dance to her own room without being observed. Each month the summons seemed to be more imperious and urgent. Once when she was alone on her knees before the lighted altar in the private chapel of the palace she suddenly felt that the words of the familiar Latin prayer had gone from her memory. She rose to her feet, she sobbed bitterly, but the call had come and she could not resist it. She passed out of the chapel and down the palace gardens. How madly she danced that night! ("The Moon Slave") ↗
#moon #pagan #imagination
The parable about the Good Samaritan tells how a Samaritan rescues a man who is mugged and beaten by robbers on the Jericho—Jerusalem road, a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. To understand how this story must have shocked the Jews, imagine someone telling a story about “The Good Nazi.” The Jews and Samaritans hated one another. ↗
It’s clear that if we use the mind attentively, mental power is increased, and if we concentrate the mind in the moment, it is easier to coordinate mind and body. But in terms of mind and body unity, is there something we can concentrate on that will reliably aid us in discovering this state of coordination? In Japan, and to some degree other Asian countries, people have historically focused mental strength in the hara (abdomen) as a way of realizing their full potential. Japan has traditionally viewed the hara as the vital center of humanity in a manner not dissimilar to the Western view of the heart or brain. I once read that years ago Japanese children were asked to point to the origin of thoughts and feelings. They inevitably pointed toward the abdominal region. When the same question was asked of American children, most pointed at their heads or hearts. Likewise, Japan and the West have commonly held differing views of what is physical power or physical health, with Japan emphasizing the strength of the waist and lower body and Western people admiring upper body power. (Consider the ideal of the sumo wrestler versus the V-shaped Western bodybuilder with a narrow waist and broad shoulders.) However, East and West also hold similar viewpoints regarding the hara, and we’re perhaps not as dissimilar as some might imagine. For instance, hara ga nai hito describes a cowardly person, “a person with no hara.” Sounds similar to our saying that so-and-so “has no guts,” doesn’t it? ↗
The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town. ↗
#greed #las-vegas #nevada #sex #imagination
(The carnal mind) is dead set against the wisdom and counsel of God, as revealed in his Word, and therefore is emphatically described as being at enmity against God (Rom. 8:7). It is so impertinent that it considers the practice of godliness, demanded by God in his Word, as pure madness and foolishness (2 Kings 9:11; 1 Cor. 1:18). Indeed, it regards the desire to live a holy life… as no better than prudishness, legalism, and hypocrisy. The carnal mind will never accept bending, yielding, and subjecting all things to the service of God in order to give first priority to the practice of true godliness. Anything rather than that! On the contrary, the carnal mind wants true godliness – indeed, everything – to bend, yield, and be made subject to its own plans and pursuits. The carnal mind devises a certain way of Christian life through which it imagines that God as well as man can be satisfied. Carnal man is willing to do certain things that God requires, such as giving money to the poor, going to church, and even partaking of the Lord’s Supper. However, other things that God also requires, such as instructing one’s household in the fear of the Lord, regularly visiting the sick, and comforting the poor, are not considered necessary or important. Carnal man rejects those things, not taking the slightest interest in them. Yet the things he himself has chosen he regards as the only right and reasonable Christian way of life. Everything outside of this he calls insincerity, prudishness, narrow-mindedness, superstition, or hypocrisy. Everything that does not fit into his own self-approved program he considers lukewarm, careless, slothful, or ungodly. Truly, these people are foolish because they deceive their own hearts with false arguments, as the apostle James explains when, for those very reasons, he declares that “this man’s religion is vain” (James 1:26). ↗
One of the first books of travel, giving European readers some insight into the unfamiliar world of the Orient, was published in 1356-67 in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by Sir John Mandeville, but a French historian, Jean d'Outremeuse, may well have written the book. It is a highly entertaining guide for pilgrims to the Holy Land, but goes beyond, taking the reader as far as Tartary, Persia, India and Egypt, recounting more fantasy than fact, but containing geographical details to give the work credence. Mandeville's book whetted the Western European reader's appetite for the travel book as a journal of marvels: dry scientific detail was not what these readers wanted. Rather it was imagination plus information. Thus, myths of 'the fountain of youth' and of gold-dust lying around 'like ant-hills' caught the Western imagination, and, when the voyagers of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found 'new worlds' in the Americas, these myths were enlarged and expanded, as Eldorado joined the Golden Road to Samarkand in the imagination of readers concerning distant lands. ↗
Indeed, and crucially so, the serial form took the control of the novel away from the reader and left him in an imagined space that could not be thought of in terms of the physical space still to be read. At the end of each instalment the reader would contemplate a vacuum, an 'end' which looked forward to a continuing verbal space which he could not measure. He might speculate but he could not know. ↗
