Quotes About Willful

T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process.

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.

Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.

Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But

It was an act of faith, and faith would not be faith if it was not hard, if it was not a test, if it was not an act of willful ignorance, of believing in something that can neither be predicted nor proved by any scientific metric.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

To a large extent, creativity is self-generated in areas of the mind beyond or beneath the individual's willful, conscious control. All he can do is discipline his consciousness to accommodate the needs of the creative process.

We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people—the ancients no less than us—have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.

didn't just die. In a very real sense, they were murdered by willful ignorance." "That is too harsh, Admiral. They meant well, as did we. The difference is that we formed our intentions based on our ideals and what we saw. They formed their intentions based on their ideals and what they wanted to see.

And, you are no doubt familiar with the 1983 Supreme Court decision, the name escapes me right now, in which the Court ruled that before a person can be thrown in jail for not paying a fine it must be proven that he or she was willfully not paying. In other words, he could pay but he refused. All this and more, right?

In my head, I was getting "gangsta," which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting "gangster" in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation.

At the heart of the human condition, we might say, is an epistemological sin—the refusal to acknowledge what can be known about God and then to respond appropriately: "Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him" (Rom. 1:21). They engage in willful blindness.

But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding out lives in check until we honor its truth.

If there is one thing I will not abide, it is the folly of a willful pride.

He looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence.