The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.
But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
To know all is to despise all.
He became an unimaginative woman’s creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.
Myself: But wasn’t the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?
How they chirped over their cups.
If you are determined on the religious life, you have to toughen up your mind. You have to let it be a thouroughfare for all thoughts, and among them you must make choices.
The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.
Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
I do not ‘get’ ideas; ideas get me.
A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him.
The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
Moderation, the Golden Mean, the Aristonmetron, is the secret of wisdom and of happiness. But it does not mean embracing an unadventurous mediocrity; rather it is an elaborate balancing act, a feat of intellectual skill demanding constant vigilance. Its aim is a reconciliation of opposites.
The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar...
Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things the job, the house, the this, the that do not really fill the place inside.
Conversation in its true meaning isn’t all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.
The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.