The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful – because the reproached self isn’t abandoned; it remains intact.
It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.
The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.
A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.
I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.
One of the great attractions of patriotism.
Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.
When truth is nothing but truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.
In life, man proposes, God disposes.
I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.
Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet’s irreplaceable capital.
Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God’s goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.
Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.