I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.
I don't believe there's anything in life you can't go back and fix. The ancient Vedas - the oldest Hindu philosophy - and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that's true, there's no such thing as a past or a future - it's all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.
I don't know about you, but all this modern technology that's supposed to save us time and effort has actually ended up making things more complicated in my life, eating up extra time.
In modern times, dogs may be pampered, but historically, a dog's life wasn't much to bark about. Hence a dog's chance is a small chance.
Driven to design by what she refers to as the lack of glamour in the industry, Bar Or creates for the modern woman who is a fashion risk-taker, one who is confident and, perhaps, has a larger than life personality.
The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.
There was, when I came to New York in the 1970s, no more profound or moving experience than MoMA, an almost perfect piece of 20th Century modernist expression, existing in an extraordinary balance - modestly, functionally, elegantly - with the extraordinary art it held. This place changed my life. I was transformed by every visit.
I wanted to modernize music, but more than that, to completely modernize people's attitudes towards life in general.
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
I'd always assumed that by 40 I'd have at least a modicum of stability - a steady income, an established career, a bountiful fullness, like a pillow into which I could sink as I entered the second half of my life.
If you set out to do something and you give it your all and it doesn't work out, be willing to modify your goal slightly. Have the ability to look in another direction. A small shift could guide you to the real purposes of your life.
The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare.
I have a strong spiritual life. I can't say that I have faith that Jesus is my Savior, but I look at Jesus in the same way that I look at, you know, Mohammed. He was giving everyone the goods. So was Gandhi.
I was perhaps lucky to be born in a single-parent home where my mother, Shirin Mohammed Ali, was the sole figure I revered. My father's absence in my life in my formative years exposed me to only one person, who was my source of learning the lessons of life. So to me, listening to a woman and her worldly view is almost automatic.
Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.
I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.
It has been an interesting road, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world, because I feel like all of those instances in my life I felt molded me and strengthened me and made me who I am.
If a process or adaptation seems too smart for nature, that's a failure of your imagination, not the hand of God. I can make that claim because we have a working model of life's morphing and molding without it.
I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.
I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.
