“Winners and losers aren’t born, they are the products of how they think.”
“If you’re bored with life, if you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things, you don’t have enough goals.”
“Life is 10 percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”
“Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.” – Lou Holtz
Wins, Losses, and Lessons is an inspirational biography by legendary college sports coach and motivational speaker Lou Holtz.
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131 Delicious Recipes for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Reversing Disease, and Lifelong Health
My favorite cookbook with gorgeous photos of delicious tasting recipes (my favorite being the ice “nice” cream — with the added benefit that the recipes are health-promoting to the point of reversing severe heart disease, diabetes (type-II), and many other ailments common to those who follow modern diets.
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“Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.”
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within”
“The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.”
“Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.” – Will Durant
Will Durant (1885-1981), with his wife Ariel Durant, spent over half a century writing his acclaimed eleven-volume, The Story of Civilization.
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“There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The story of Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, and his adventures in Neverland. A classic of children’s literature written for adults.
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“The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show—to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe.”
“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.”
“By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes—of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities—an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction. For instance, consider two statues of man: one as a Greek god, the other as a deformed medieval monstrosity. Both are metaphysical estimates of man; both are projections of the artist’s view of man’s nature; both are concretized representations of the philosophy of their respective cultures. Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.”
“As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.”
“The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.”
“In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other. That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.” – Ayn Rand
A revolutionary treatise on the nature of art and its purpose in human life.
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“How did artists progress from Egyptian sculptures to a work such as Frishmuth’s The Vine – two of the works on the front cover? To find out, we focus on innovations that gave the sculptors who created them – and all those who followed – greater power to make viewers stop, look, and think about sculptures. This jargon-free book is a great introduction or refresher for anyone interested in art or art history. Since it provides a framework for looking at any period of Western sculpture, it will make your next museum visit (virtual or actual) more enjoyable. If you’re the friend, partner, or relative of an art enthusiast, it’s a first step toward sharing their excitement. Most importantly, though, Innovators in Sculpture can help you find more subjects, styles, and periods that intrigue you and appeal to you – that show the world the way you think it can and ought to be. And what’s the point of looking at art, if not for moments like that?” – Diane Durante
Innovators in Sculpture by Dianne L. Durante examines the past five thousand years of sculpture by examining great innovative works of sculpture. By understanding the ideas behind those sculptural innovations one can connect with the minds of those artists from years long past.
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“Never let up. In stories, things go from bad to worse, even if nobody wants them to. If she wants to apologize, interrupt her. Whenever anyone is about to release tension, interrupt her. Is the couple on the date about to kiss? Pull them apart. You might think the audience will love you if you give them what they want. Not true. Make them want it, then yank it away.” – Matt Bird
An invaluable resource and reference guide on the concept (the Pitch: Does this concept excite everyone who hears about it?, Story Fundamentals: Will this concept generate a strong story?, The Hook: Will this be marketable and generate word of mouth?), character (Believe: Do we recognize the hero as a human being? Care: Do we feel for the hero? Invest: Can we trust the hero to tackle this challenge?, dialogue (Empathetic: Is the dialogue true to human nature? Specific: Is the dialogue specific to this world and each personality? Heightened: Is the dialogue more pointed and dynamic than real talk? Strategic: Are certain dialogue scenes withheld until necessary? ), scene work (Does this scene begin with the essential elements it needs? The Conflict: Is this a compelling collision of competing agendas? The Outcome: Does this scene change the story going forward?), tone, theme, and more.
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“Marva Collins taught school for two years in Alabama, then moved to Chicago, where she taught in public schools for 14 years. Her experiences in that system, coupled with her dissatisfaction with the quality of education that her two youngest children were receiving in prestigious private schools, convinced her that children deserved better than what was passing for acceptable education. She took the $5,000 balance in her school pension fund and opened her own school on the second floor of her home. The Westside Preparatory School was founded in 1975 in Garfield Park, a Chicago inner-city area. During the first year, Collins took in learning disabled, problem children and even one child who had been labeled by Chicago public school authorities as borderline retarded. At the end of the first year, every child scored at least five grades higher proving that the previous labels placed on these children were misguided. 60 Minutes, visited her school for the second time in 1996. That little girl who had been labeled as borderline retarded, graduated from college Summa Cum Laude. … Marva’s graduates entered colleges and universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. They became physicians, lawyers, engineers, and educators.”
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“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Victor Frankl
The remarkable story of Victor E. Frankl, who survived imprisonment in Nazi Concentration Camps, and was motivated by his search for meaning. A powerful demonstration of the importance of free will.
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“This book challenges the premises of the growing crusade against law enforcement. In Part One, I rebut the founding myths of the Black Lives Matter movement—including the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. I document the hotly contested ‘Ferguson effect,’ a trend that I first spotted nationally, wherein officers desist from discretionary policing and criminals thus become emboldened. In Part Two, I outline the development of the misguided legal push to force the NYPD to give up its stop, question, and frisk tactic. In Part Three, I analyze criminogenic environments in Chicago and Philadelphia and put to rest the excuse that crime—black crime especially—is the result of poverty and inequality. Finally, in Part Four, I expose the deceptions of the mass-incarceration conceit and show that the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison is actually the result of violence, not racism.” — Heather Mac Donald
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