I saw a great Newfoundland dog the other day sitting in front of a mirror at the entrance to a shop in Regent's Circus, and examining himself with an amount of smug satisfaction that I have never seen equaled elsewhere outside a vestry meeting.
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
I saw a lot of movies that I probably shouldn't have seen. I saw 'Dog Day Afternoon' when I was in first grade - that kind of thing.
To this day I don't ever remember seeing a pet inside Moscow, I never saw anyone carrying a dog, or leading a dog. Err I finally saw a, a pet some years later in Kiev, so I thought that life must have been, different.
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.
We breed dogs to be more social than the wolf. There is very interesting research that has been done with a wolf and a domestic dog. If you have a tamed wolf and you have him sit in front of the experimenter or stand in front of his master and his two dishes, one to the right, one to the left โ so that the dog or wolf see the food put in the left hand dish but the owner points to the right โ the domesticated will go where owner points, whereas the the wolf goes right where he saw the meat thing put. In other words, in a dog social cue from a master can override where he saw the being placed.
If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.
When I took the habit, the Lord immediately showed me how He favours those who do violence to themselves in order to serve Him. No one saw what I endured... At the moment of my entrance into this new state I felt a joy so great that it has never failed me even to this day; and God converted the dryness of my soul into a very great tenderness.
There is no need to mention the great difference between the amount of satisfaction there is in just oneself being happy and the amount of satisfaction there is in an infinite number of people being happy.
You notice how they always put the fruit and veg at the entrance to the supermarket? You go in thinking 'this is a fresh shop, everything in here is FRESH! I will do well to shop here'. You never go straight to the bit with the toilet paper, loo brushes and such do you? You'd think 'this is a POO shop! Everything in here is themed on POO!
The productiveness of any meeting depends on the level of thought given to the agenda in advance, and you should never leave a meeting without writing a follow-up list with each item assigned to one person. And go outside. All the big ideas are on the outside. You'll never have a creative idea at your desk.
Being on TV in front of people is a lot different than sitting in a dark room with a microphone. When I had my radio show, I was on four hours a day for 20-something years. If you put a live microphone in front of Mother Teresa for that amount of time, she'd piss somebody off.
Never waste any amount of time doing anything important when there is a sunset outside that you should be sitting under! - C. JoyBell C.
For me, faith is more about aspiration than complacency - the smug satisfaction that other people find distasteful.
I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
I was sitting in this small coffee shop a couple days ago and I saw this old man sitting at a table across from me. He looked so lonely, so sad. I was too, but it suddenly occurred to me that some people go through their whole lives never being loved or loving as deeply as I love you. There's always going to be the chance that I could lose you in this lifetime. There's nothing any of us can do about the possibility of loss. But in that moment, I decided that I was more interested in focusing on the great privilege I've been given in having you at all. Ch. 32
We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants.