Quotes About Acceptance

How can you sit next to this filthy gay?' he asked me. 'It's called gravity,' I said. 'Look it up, when you have an afternoon to spare.

The world and I are not on speaking terms, Karla said to me once in those early months. The world keeps trying to win me back, she said, but it doesn't work. I guess I'm just not the forgiving type.

And little by little, things settled down to the semblance of peace that's good enough, when you know enough about bad enough.

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

It's unbecoming, she agreed. A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

Always the bridesmaid , never the bride. Always the godfather, never the god.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.

To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.

I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.

Yes, illness is serious, but the indignities are also funny. And that defines my world view.

However, while the Nazi barbarians and their collaborators threatened the entire world, I could not accept his philosophy and, after several earlier attempts, was finally accepted into the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of World War II.

I don't feel I was 'born American,' but my homeland was denied to me after the end of World War II, and I craved something I could identify with. When I became a student at Harvard in the 1950s, America very quickly filled the vacuum. I felt I was American, but I think it's more revealing of America how quickly others here accepted me.

Learning to accept failure on multiple levels is, to my way of thinking, the key to become a world-class therapist. But that means humility, and setting your ego aside, while you develop superb new technical skills.

When I would go to the barrio, people saw me as a rich person, but when I'm around rich people, they see me as someone from the ghetto. It's all perceptions. I like moving between worlds. I feel equally comfortable in both.

While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.

I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.

I'm half Puerto Rican and half Jewish and so, in some ways, living in many worlds at once is where I feel most at home.

Where I grew up, I could be a punk rocker and a jock. But in college, it became apparent that those two worlds didn't mix. When I brought my guitar back to school after Thanksgiving break, a friend handed me his bass and said, 'Listen to the Ramones.'

I mean I think children love the idea that there are different viewpoints and different words for things and different worlds. And the more that they pretend to be other people, the harder it is for them to hate them and misunderstand them when they grow up.

Indie world won't have me, and mainstream world treats me like an alien, but here I am still floating between these two worlds.