People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions. Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
Golf teaches you honesty. It teaches you discipline. It gives you a strong appreciation of nature. And personal responsibility, something that lacks in our society at times. I mean, it's only your fault, you can't blame anyone else when you shank it. Or pick the wrong club.
I've always been a very rebellious, philosophical person, so my mother set the foundation for my appreciation for nature and my empathy for other people. But then, being a sort of rebellious, philosophical thinker, I'm always looking for new ways to shake things up. So I feel like I'm really lucky to be alive in a time where there's so much opportunity to disrupt and shake it up. It's sort of a combination between that and having the foundation that my mother gave me.
In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
Basically, as a kid I grew up to a lot of good music, and part of my appreciation for music, from being a small child, was appreciating Jamaican music.
Here's the gift of gratitude: In order to feel it, your ego has to take a backseat. What shows up in its place is greater compassion and understanding. Instead of being frustrated, you choose appreciation. And the more grateful you become, the more you have to be grateful for.
I think I will still feel that same appreciation for what [Winston] Churchill and others have said is the worst form of government except all the alternatives.
Every time we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return?
Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.