November 2009
"Twenty-four brand-new hours"
“Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.
Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The Question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.
We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive at the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.
Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment. …
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“its sad when people you know, become people you knew, when you can walk right past someone like they were never a big part of your life, how you used to be able to talk for hours and now you can barely look at them”
—(via scribble-scribbles) I wish that this will never happen to you and me:(anywhey
“you lost your way home, and you felt like a passenger left by the road, well i’ll tell you the reason you couldn’t get home, cos home is nowhere you’ve been and it’s nowhere you’re going, home is only a feeling you get in your mind from the people you love and travel beside, you may feel like a passenger, but now you’re the driver, you’ve got to keep travelling and travelling on, cos if you break down, it’s a cold hard shoulder , so fuel up your mind and fire up your heart , and drive on, drive on, and when your days are darker, put your foot down harder and drive on”
—
fuel up - stornoway(via scribble-scribbles)
“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
—J.K. Rowling (via quote-book) :D
“At the end of the day faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don’t really expect it. It’s like one day you realize that the fairy tale may be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it may not be a castle. And it’s not so important happy ever after, just that its happy right now. See once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you , and once in a while people may even take your breath away.’”
—Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy (via kari-shma) (via quote-book)
Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart (New Scientist) →
newscientist.com
“A high IQ is like height in a basketball player,” says David Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things aren’t equal. There’s a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there’s a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ.”
IQ tests and their proxies, which are designed to measure a factor known as general intelligence, are used by many businesses and colleges to help select the “best” candidates, and also play a role in schools and universities, in the form of SAT tests in the US and CATs in the UK. “IQ tests determine, to an important degree, the academic and professional careers of millions of people in the US,” Stanovich says in his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss (Yale University Press, 2008). He challenges the “lavish attention” society bestows on such tests, which he claims measure only a limited part of cognitive functioning. “IQ tests are overvalued, and I think most psychologists would agree with that,” says Jonathan Evans, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Plymouth, UK.
