Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
The second he slipped inside of me, all I'd doubted, questioned, or feared evaporated, leaving me with one single, definite truth--I'd fallen in love with him in an all-consuming blaze that would blind me if I wasn't careful. We fit together like poorly cut puzzle pieces, but when the edges joined and were positioned just right, our scattered images came together to create a solid, deliberate piece of art, completely crystal clear and in focus. I was a goner.
Is there a problem, Ms. Parker? Something you want to say to me?" Reaching for his tie, he began to loosen it, unraveling it with his fingers, angry eyes still locked on mine."I'm not sure I like being your pet. Or science project, I don't know which.""You have a smart mouth.""You make smart observances.""You're going to make this invitation difficult, aren't you?""If you're dishonest with me, yes.""You'll regret it if you don't accept.""Is that a threat?""That's a promise.
Stumbling closer, I held up the manuscript, the pages flapping frantically in the wind. “I take it this is a murder mystery? You killed the ex-fiancée and thanked her in the dedication? Mighty dignified of you, I must say.”“Nah. It’s a horror novel. But yeah, the bimbo dies in the end. Bob Hall says it’s going to be a bestseller, so I figured I owed her some thanks for the inspiration.” He edged a few feet closer, his smile spread from ear to ear. The glimmer in his eyes flickered toward the ocean, breaking our connection. He hung his head, licked his lips, then returned his eyes to mine, restoring the connection with an intense smolder. “Are you gonna get over here, or what?”Letting out a soft chuckle, the tears began to blind me. “Make me.
I winked and locked my arm in Carter's, and we stood there, watching Dean stroll away."You know the guy's never gonna give up," Carter nudged me, letting out a sigh."We'd have really pretty babies, huh?""Yup. They'd be rad little Brangelinas, running around tearing the place up.""Yeah, you're right. My rejection is such a disservice to the world...
What do you see when you look at me?”My eyes narrowed and I pressed my lips together, weighing my thoughts. All of his bimbo admirers aside, what did I see? What did my gut tell me about this man? What did it say that allowed me to wind up here with him, under such impulsive circumstances?“You’re a sad man,” I swallowed. “You’re arrogant and set in your ways, but that creates a fortress for you. It’s your safe haven. Behind the moat is someone who has lost something he loved, only I’m not sure what, or who. You’re afraid of something and your loyalty is hidden away in a cell, wounded by betrayal.” I rested my head on the pillow. “That’s what I see.”“On second thought,” he exhaled, letting his head drop next to mine. “You’re psychic.
I better go," Carter squeezed me once more and stood, grabbing his wallet from the coffee table. "I need to hit up the lottery if I want to get you out of this mess. Will you let me buy a monkey if we win, though?""Only if you buy me an island off the coast of Fiji.""You crazy-ass woman. A monkey is so much cooler than an island.""How about a monkey IN Fiji?""Now there's a woman after my own heart," Carter slapped his hand to his chest, sighing dramatically. "I'll let you know if we win." He started for the door."Uh huh.""You'll know if we do. I'll be the one streaking on Pike Street.
Well, in the meantime, Carter and I have been discussing the matter of Ryan." This time it wasn't the clang of a pan I heard, but instead a messy smack--the contact of Carter's backhand with Dean's head, I presumed. "Just hear me out. You have options. I have an Italian uncle. He'll make sure Ryan is sleeping with the fishes by next week.""Dean!" Unable to repress my amusement, my eyes flew wide and my grin grew."Either that, or we can go all Sweeney Todd on him and--""Oh, will you stop?" My laughter was crippling. "There will be no calls to your uncle and no trip to the barber shop--please, leave Sweeney Todd out of it.
Hey Kate, you coming to our show Friday night?" He leaned in close and touched my shoulder. "The guys would love to see you there.""Yes. Yes, the guys would indeed." Carter rolled his eyes and smirked. I held back my grin, well aware that he was laughing inwardly at the same thing I was. When Dean spoke of 'the guys,' he mostly meant himself. With a body like a Ken doll and hair like Meredith's McDreamy, I couldn't figure out for the life of me what he wanted with me.
The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets. Ultimately, this is true living and love of self...from within.
Divide the constant tide and random noisiness of energetic flow, with conscious recurring moments of empty mind, solitude, gratitude and deep...slow...breathing. Of this, the natural law of self-preservation demands.
Some social ills are preserved by the common misbelief that things such as ignorance, greed, and stupidity do not have the stamina required to reach old age.
The creation of man is evidence for the love of God, the preservation of man is evidence for the patience of God, and Christ is evidence for the forgiveness of God. It is when we are wrapped up in our own little peeves that we begin to displace His benevolence with malevolence.
Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
Trust is not a gasoline-soaked blanket that succumbs to the matches of betrayal, never able to be used for its warmth again; it’s a tapestry that wears thin in places, but can be patched over if you have the right materials, circumstances, and patience to repair it. If you don’t, you’re always the one who feels the coldest when winter comes.
Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.
This is an instance of the truism that, when switching from one recording medium to another, there is always a considerable data loss. As the Roman empire declined, continuing preservation of early texts would be dependent on the efforts of the book copyists in the Middle Ages - and good luck. Are there any resemblances to our current digitization concerns?
Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.
When I was a child, my mother would try to convince me of a woman's need for a secret stash. "It can be anything: land, property, even a couple hundred dollars. You know, in case anything goes wrong and you have to get the hell out of there." Her mother had told her this, as her mother before had told her.
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Some call me nature, others call me Mother Nature. ... How you choose to live each day, whether you regard me or disregard me, doesn't really matter to me. One way or other, your actions will determine your fate, not mine. I am nature. I will go on. I am prepared to evolve. Are you?
If people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...
The power of an idea is never to be underestimated. Many a thought has survived long after its host has ceased to be. It is the power of an idea that no shield can defend against, nor sword divide, nor poison infect. As such, we must aspire to create ideas, rather than preserve life. In a sense, this is how we achieve true immortality and live on past our time.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…
What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.
There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity's control.
. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonementfinite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preservingwill not permit forgetting; destroyingonly when we can no longer begor argue with time to preserve the brief benisonsa few moments longer than our sins
Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things." We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water.
The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet, floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions.
Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction fol
But as the Everglades continued to wither, a few of their colleagues began to wonder if conservation really should mean development more than preservation. These heretics did not believe that God had created man in order to 'improve' or 'redeem' nature; they found God's grace in nature itself.