Quotes Tagged "inevitable"

Changing is what people do when they have no options left.

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research. Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed.

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting — In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

God takes the impossible and makes it the inevitable.

so it came time and no day like that is ever good in the coming

There are two most important and inevitable words in love are:- Perception and projection.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

I knew there would be some controversy over the 'Potter' series between religious people and secular-minded people - that was inevitable - what astonished me and continues to astonish me is the intense controversy that erupted very early on among Christians themselves, in all the churches. It cuts across every denominational line.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

When contrarian voices are elevated to publications once viewed as places where contending ideas shared space, organized online backlash is now inevitable.

Eight years of work can be copied in six months. It wasn't inevitable that it was going to work. A stolen design is stolen time.

I have reached a conclusion that when we have to make a choice between greater Israel or a Jewish democratic state - and we have to make this choice, it is inevitable - then my choice is a Jewish democratic country.

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.

There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.

Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

It's almost inevitable there's going to be an escalation on both sides.

One of the inevitable aspects of debates about euthanasia is the reluctance on the part of advocates to confront the essence of what they propose.

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.

In my view, a united Ireland is inevitable, and it is certainly more likely than a voluntary coalition which doesn't include Sinn Fein.