A Quote by Stephen Batchelor

Living from our deepest understanding requires an enormous effort, especially when it goes against the stream of our instinctually programmed perceptions of the world.

Stephen Batchelor

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Against Deepest Effort Enormous Goes Living Our Perceptions Programmed Requires Stream Understanding World

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Stephen Batchelor
Scottish - Author
Born: April 7, 1953

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

Terry Teachout

We have to prepare our teenagers and our children for a world away from us. That requires explanations. That requires understanding.

Andy Andrews

Let's remember that our leadership is defined not just by our defence against threats, but by the enormous opportunities to do good and promote understanding.

Barack Obama

For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

Madeleine L'Engle

Remember that our reactions are a product of our perceptions, and our perceptions are a result of what is at the center of our life.

Stephen Covey

The machine not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The mind is malleable. Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.

Matthieu Ricard

The acknowledgment that God is always with us - even when we are least aware of it in our sensory being - requires discipline. To acknowledge the Unseen Real requires a concerted effort of our will at first. This is why the term practicing the presence is so useful.

Leanne Payne

I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.

James Lovelock

In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all. It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it.

Robert Breault

In a world of danger and trial, peace is our deepest aspiration, and when peace comes we will gladly convert not our swords into plowshares, but our bombs into peaceful reactors, and our planes into space vessels. "Pursue peace," the Bible tells us, and we shall pursue it with every effort and every energy that we possess. But it is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.

John F. Kennedy

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

Anais Nin

The object of religion is the imagination, that deep and inexhaustible font of our understanding and symbolizing our deepest possibilities.

Eugene Kennedy

Our uniqueness, our individuality, and our life experience molds us into fascinating beings. I hope we can embrace that. I pray we may all challenge ourselves to delve into the deepest resources of our hearts to cultivate an atmosphere of understanding, acceptance, tolerance, and compassion. We are all in this life together.

Linda Thompson

Living consciously is seeking to be aware of everything that bears on our interests, actions, values, purposes, and goals. It is the willingness to confront facts, pleasant or unpleasant. It is the desire to discover our mistakes and correct them . . . it is the quest to keep expanding our awareness and understanding, both of the world external to self and the world within.

Nathaniel Branden

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A Quote by Stephen Batchelor

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