life on planet earth on Impressions

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

A holy life will make the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns, they just shine.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.

Tom Clegg, a consultant with Church Growth Institute, states, "When visitors walk through the door, they will decide in 3 to 8 minutes whether they will take you seriously and whether they will r...

If someone is looking for a church, she will drive by the facility and decide within three seconds if it might be a fit. If she actually shows up, she determines whether to return in another three sec...

For thousands of years human beings have communicated with one another first in the language of dress. Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you annou...

Honoré de Balzac would eventually become a celebrated writer in post-Napoleanic France. He was renowned for his complex characters and realistic writing style. But like many young and aspiring writers...

What do the royals and a Rorschach test have in common? Both provoke reactions that tell us more about the attitudes and beliefs of the beholder than about the object of their gaze. This is not to say...

Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitudes toward life. The longer I live the more convinced I become that life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we res...

One of my favorite things to do is to sit on the aft deck of a boat going across the ocean and just watch the wake. It is such a beautiful, ever-changing creation as the ship continues on its path. Yo...

Everything we do proceeds from a decision of will, involves our intelligence and perception, leads to emotional reactions or experiences, is approved or disapproved by the conscience, and is registere...

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Desires are best understood as our most honest experiences of ourselves, in all our complexity and depth, as we relate to people and things around us

Entering a place that is new to us, or seeing a familiar place anew, we move from part to part, simultaneously perceiving individual persons and things and discovering their relationships, so that, wi...

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determinin...

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any—lifted from the no of all nothing—human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are ope...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

The rise of both video spectacles and marketed consumables is no accidental marriage. Images capture our attention and lure us because they implicitly ask us to try on various costumes of identity, to...

Memory is more indelible than ink.

"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."

What you allow to occupy your mind will sooner or later determine your feelings, your speech and your actions. Thoughts . . . have a real impact on how you feel and behave.”

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

Attitudes are more important than facts

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

It is quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am right.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Emotions make our minds speak to each other. They are the most faithful reproduction of our inner worlds, broadcast externally in the expression of our faces.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.