Quotes About Externals

When our identities are tethered to externals, our sense of self-worth is always in danger. In the end, we become hypersensitive, insecure, and discontent, always comparing ourselves to the next parent, the next young professional, the next pastor across town. But

Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away.

Without a clear purpose, you will keep changing directions, jobs, relationships, churches, or other externals — hoping each change will settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in your heart. You think, Maybe this time it will be different, but it doesn't solve your real problem — a lack of focus and purpose.

If you want to make progress, put up with being perceived as ignorant or naive in worldly matters, don't aspire to a reputation for sagacity. If you do impress others as somebody, don't altogether believe it. You have to realize, it isn't easy to keep your will in agreement with nature, as well as externals. Caring about the one inevitably means you are going to shortchange the other.

Taking account of the value of externals, you see, comes at some cost to the value of one's own character.

If you would improve, be content to be thought foolish and dull with regard to externals. Do not desire to be thought to know anything; and though you should appear to others to be somebody, distrust yourself. For be assured, it is not easy at once to keep your will in harmony with nature and to secure externals; but while you are absorbed in the one, you must of necessity neglect the other. XIV

Now I am being called upon for some purpose. I answer the call determined to observe the right limits; to act with restraint, but also with confidence, devoid of desire or aversion towards externals.

There is one road to peace and happiness (keep the thought near by morning, noon and night): renunciation of externals;

In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals that I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find food and bad? In me, in my choices.

For what else is tragedy than the perturbations ([Greek: pathae]) of men who value externals exhibited in this kind of poetry?

If it should ever happen to you to be turned to externals in order to please some person, you must know that you have lost your purpose in life.

I]f you gape after externals, you must of necessity ramble up and down in obedience to the will of your master. And who is the master? He who has the power over the things which you seek to gain or try to avoid.

Don't look for it in externals; it isn't in the body, and, if you doubt me, just look at Myron or Ophellius. It isn't in wealth, look at Croesus, or look at the rich of today: you'll see how unhappy they are.

If you ever happen to turn your attention to externals, for the pleasure of any one, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be contented, then, in everything, with being a philosopher; and if you with to seem so likewise to any one, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you.

I harbor ill feelings toward a society, and a clergy, that allows marriage partners to split over the smallest incompatibility, where divorce comes in a multitude of flavors, like Baskin Robbins ice cream, where men and women can blame one another and everything except themselves for matrimony's mess. They look for externals over which they have no control and, fingering them, take no responsibility.

Jesus tried to teach people to take the focus off externals, i.e., the "law." Instead, he wanted everyone to look deep within themselves to where, in the inner Kingdom of Heaven, all humans are one.

The inferior man regulates his life by externals: inasmuch as he is constrained by desire for long life, reputation, riches, rank or offspring, he is not free. The superior man is of another sort, and of him it may be said, with Chuan Tzu, 'that they live in accordance with their own nature. In the whole world they have no equal. They regulate their life by inward things.

But when we train the senses we conserve our vital energy, the very stuff of life. Patient and secure within, we do not have to look to externals for satisfaction. No matter what happens outside--whether events are for or against us, however people behave towards us, whether we get what pleases us or do not--we are in no way dependent. Then it is that we can give freely to others; then it is that we can love.

I wasn't an actor. They they take the externals. Here I was, a kid thrown into Hollywood with a brand-new name, starring in motion pictures.

How I would like that now, that sheer senseless falling in love with externals, the love never earned by qualities of goodness, of character, of intelligence, of wit, of charm, of life-force. In short, how I would like to be loved in a way never earned so that I would never have to keep earning it or work for it

I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!

The dull externals of the screenwriter's working life are well known: We are the people taking up too much table space at cafes.

The photograph has a double density.... It is the daughter of the world of externals, of the living second, and as such will always keep something of the historic or scientific document about it; but it is also the daughter of the rectangle.

Oh, sure, he was a good business man. I got that in a minute. But, underneath all the externals, they were the same kind. It hadn't anything to do with the faithfulness or meanness. They were just the same breed of cats. If you're a dog and you fall in love with a cat, that's just your hard luck.