Agatha Christie Quotes

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Programmers and marketing people know how to get into your subconscious - they spend millions of dollars researching colors, shapes, designs, symbols, that affect your preferences, and they can make you feel warm, trusting, like buying. They can manipulate you.

In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology.

Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted.

The relationship that tests/frustrates/irritates you the most actually is one of your greatest blessings. Why? Because it reveals to you the very beliefs/fears and false assumptions that most limit you.

For many people the reason why they're idiots is not necessarily that their brain doesn't work well, it's that they got in a terrible pattern.

As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

My imagination is more tweaked by imagining the lives of the people who were there before us. I don't need to give myself the willies. I'm quite good at that - I can freak myself out wherever I am.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

The only thing we are naturally afraid of is pain, or loss of pleasure. And because these are not annexed to any shape, colour, or size of visible objects, we are frighted of none of them, till either we have felt pain from them, or have notions put into us that they will do us harm.

: There are only two on-buttons for fear, in any permutation you want. One is when something that shouldn't be is, meaning a presence. And, the other one is an absence.

If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.

Even the people who do great jokes, [it's] always coming out of a very real place.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

Coming from a background as unique as mine, the first challenge is being able to identify chaos as chaos. For the first half of my life, I interpreted chaos as normal. Today, I am aware that I have triggers: a default way of thinking that is often not relative to the immediate moment. Therefore, in the midst of chaos, I have learned to relinquish all my premature cognitive commitments and become present.

Down the well," Angela repeated, and had to go sit down and hold on to her letter opener. It was in the shape of a dagger. Angela said holding it soothed her; seeing Angela hold it did not soothe Kami.

Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears.

Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.

Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.

The moment you can learn to deal with homosexuality in art, it's quite an exciting moment, just as in a sense when people 'come out' it's quite an exciting moment. It means they become aware of their desires, and can deal with them in a remarkably honest way.

apparel, n.: There are times I don’t mind doing the laundry, because folding your clothes reminds me of the shape of you.

Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.