Quotes About Openness

a lot of what makes one man a ruler and another not is simply a willingness to be wrong.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...

One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, "Why are you asking that?

Gay men and lesbians have already opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people. When they marry, the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up. No hierarchical tradition underlies their union.

Tobin James Mueller: 'No one is turned away, my one rule. I never say no. That's one of the reasons it became a utopia.

The thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word lost comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

Woolf is celebrating getting lost, not literally lost as in not knowing how to find your way, but lost as in open to the unknown, and the way that physical space can provide psychic space.

Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.

What had seemed Bohemian was now Babylonian; what had begun as openness was now exhibitionism; the porn merchants had worked out that there was more money in joyless guilt than in guiltless joy, and the only freedom celebrated in these littered streets was the one civil liberty that civilised societies never denied their citizens – their right to seek degradation and self-destruction any which way they liked.

WHEN WE CONSIDER THAT everything we experience results from a complex interplay of causes and conditions, we find that there is no single thing to desire or resent and it is more difficult for the afflictions of attachment and anger to arise. In this way the view of interdependence makes our minds more relaxed and open.

Freedom equals your capacity to live in the unknown

Advertisements with Semco's name at the top ran in several newspapers asking for résumés via e-mail. Four hundred people replied. There were no rules for narrowing down the respondents. We didn't want a list of requirements to limit our options, so the idea was to make the process highly intuitive and to follow our gut reactions.

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.

His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

The fact that we can't see the beauty in something doesn't suggest that it's not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.

The truth is, we don't know what's going to happen—we just think we do. Often we make a big deal out of something. We blow up scenarios in our minds about all the terrible things that are going to happen. Most of the time we are wrong. If we keep our cool and stay open to possibilities, we can be reasonably certain that, eventually, all will be well. Remember: maybe so, maybe not.

You don't need to change your core beliefs or your deepest held positions. All you're doing is expanding your mind and opening your heart to new ideas.

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

O amor é público, ou não é amor.