Quotes About Shaping

You not only create your life with your thoughts, but your thoughts add powerfully to the creation of the world. If you thought that you were insignificant and had no power in this world, think again. Your mind is actually shaping the world around you.

What constitutes a fit between artist and mentor? It is not necessarily style, or even sensibility, though sensibility gets closer to describing it. Aesthetic might be the best. If a shared aesthetic exists, the mentor can come to view the mentee as another of his projects: a shaping and sculpting, and a carrying forward of the mentor's aesthetic.

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.

Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.

The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it, as it does by having it answered. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn't even have seen before.

We are shaped by our shaping of the world.

See yourself as a pioneer in a new world. We are not facing the end of the world, as some would have us believe, but the greatest adventure of our lives. We have the unique opportunity to write a new chapter in the history of humankind, to be active participants in shaping a new world.

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it--even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

From an evolutionary perspective, parenting isn't a good model for parents and children. Caring for children, nurturing them and investing in them, is absolutely critical for human thriving. Teaching children implicitly and explicitly is certainly important. But, from the point of view of evolution, trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating.

Our aid budget has a crucial role to play in shaping the world according to our universal values of democracy, enterprise and justice.

I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy.

Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.

I'm going to make an animal out of you, my boy!

you can't ridicule my ignorance when you had a hand in shaping it!

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

The ultimate objective of American policy should be benign and visionary: to shape a truly cooperative global community, in

Your faith is like putty. How easily you mold it to your own desires.

Young bodies are like tender plants, which grow and become hardened to whatever shape you've trained them.

Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information. What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told.

The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation's work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst.1

Nobody disputes the enormous responsibility a mother has for shaping her children's lives: I get to shape their personalities, their experiences, their very futures. Isn't that wonderful? No. It's terrifying.

To paraphrase Feenberg commenting on Heidegger, we could say that the form taken by technologies stems not only from experts' intervention but also from that of the concerned groups that have been allowed to contribute to their shaping. And just as there are good and bad sculptors who are more or less skilled in seeing what is inessential in the stone they are sculpting, so too there are good and bad ways of identifying and involving (or not involving) concerned groups. To

We're not in the business of shaping consumer demand. We respond to it.