Frank Herbert
- Collected Sayings Of Muad'Dib By The Princess Irulan
There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort.
Miyamoto Musashi
- A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy
Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit.
David Sirlin
- Playing To Win
Let us look at what it is like to play competitively. A competitive game, to me, is a debate. You argue your points with your opponent, and he argues his. "I think this series of moves is optimal," you say, and he retorts, "Not when you take this into account." Debates in real life are highly subjective, but in games we can be absolutely sure who the winner is.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Green Mars
Don't be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Green Mars
Indeed, the giddiest of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician's - the calculus of human interaction is so much more subtle and variable than any physics.
Orson Scott Card
- Speaker For The Dead
The enmity began when he reached the top of the hill, a wide, almost flat expanse of lawn and garden immaculately tended, with crushed ores from the smelter making neat paths. Here is the world of the Church, thought Ender, everything in its place and no weeds allowed.
Rollo May
- Love and Death
We now confront one of the most profound and meaningful paradoxes of love. This is the intensified openness to love which the awareness of death gives us and, simultaneously, the increased sense of death which love brings with it.
Abraham Maslow
- From a letter written while recuperating from a heart attack.
The confrontation with death - and the reprieve from it - makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful... Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die.
