When you grow up surrounded by willful ignorance, you have to believe that mercy has it's own country and that it's round and borderless.
One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised. Betrayal, though. . . betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope.
Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied. . . . The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.
[The] idealization of marriage is typical of those who are excluded from it: priests, gays, adolescents. It shows an extraordinary willful blindness.
My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen. " — Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)
Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.
Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.
That's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion.
Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.
Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe.
To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.
I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?
The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few.
Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.
The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.
A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
