I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

Human conditions are merely a part of the illusory, dreamlike nature of our body/mind/personality's functioning. Meditation renders those conditions powerless. If only for a moment. If those moments come more and more frequently, the conditions become less and less powerful.

Life offers no security. The idea of security and certainty are a function of education and economic power. While both are important, neither can bring you Happiness. You are happy only when you are doing what you love doing. And that means you must be willing to go where Life is taking you. Uncertainty, adventure, journeying into the unknown?all these are an integral part of the process of Life!

When you are expectationless, when you focus only on your actions, on what you can do best in a given context, and leave the results to a higher energy, to Life, then, you are non-frustrated. When frustration sets in, you become unhappy. And when you are not happy, you are dysfunctional. Which is why, being non-frustrated is key to constructive action, on any front, in any walk of Life.

A relationship is a function of intentions. It only works when you intend it to.

When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.

Everything that comes from God must go back to God. They become dysfunctional when they remain with man. Blessings must turn to praise and praise is not just giving thanks for what God gave, it is giving back to Him what He gave. Don't give thanks to God for things that He gave and deny Him access to them for His use. Whatever blessing you don't return back to God in praise turns to pride.

Water is to India as blood is to the body, with the many rivers functioning as arteries ? the Ganges being the aorta ? and the monsoon timelessly arriving as a much-needed annual blood transfusion.

"He leaned in, held his breath so as not to make a noise, went close to her, inhaled the scent that emanated from the pores of her forehead; inhaled the air that bounced back from her head. He stopped there, listening intently to the blood flowing, heart beating, pulse pulsating, her hair drifting slowly below her ear resting where the carotid artery was. He closed his eyes as if picturing everything. Like a dexterous doctor discerning the malfunction in a patient or an adroit maestro listening to every note to discern where the one note is missing.

"I suppose I've overdosed on ideas more than a couple of thousand times in my lifetime and, all things considered, am still functioning exceptionally well. I'm busy with projects, and my mind, powered by an unlimited source of Inspirational, is still working on overdrive exceeding natural thought limits. I suppose that was a good buildup for the punchline, a fairly good verbal drumroll for the climax, and a good preparation paragraph predecessor to the grand finale:

"It is egoism that leads to the latent destruction of mental, elastic genes. The adaptive transformation functions of conformism lead them to complete vulnerability. Selfishness as the basis for the development of marketing of human weakness.

"There are people who come from dysfunctional families.

There are personal responsibilities in the form of work and schooling, family needs, and the endless list of chores that ensure a functional household. Progress does not always look pretty.

Neatness and cleanliness is not a function of how rich or poor you are but that of mentality and principle.

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

As Baba Ram Dass (his 'spiritual name'), Richard Alpert explained human attachment as a 'clue that there's work to be done' ? meaning that territoriality was remastered by him as dysfunctional and primitive, and as requiring the curative attentions of a guru, ordinarily an older man.

The function of a nutrient is to become transmuted, not to leave unaltered traces.

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

"Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don't know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "S?, abbiamo un'anima. Ma ? fatta di tanti piccoli robot ? "Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That's the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we're here. No buffalo knows it's a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we're members of Homo sapiens, and it's the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.

Make sure to keep your MORAL ethos alive and functioning, whilst you pursue amending other persons IMMORAL actions

A civil liberty is an artery that feeds compassion to a functioning democracy.

Having an understanding of the human mind and how it functions is probably the single most important thing anyone who wants to be successful can do

This is where the search for meaning had led our medieval ancestors: to the certainty that God, who made all of creation, had scattered clues to the useful functions of creating things in those things, and that only a little vigilance was necessary to decode those clues. Simpling was but the most basic of this kind of learning; the search for Signs, as undertaken by the sixteenth-century German humanist Paracelsus, was a further extension of the same idea.