I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world – different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.
His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.
All the mystery and wisdom of the masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade. Wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful and worthy.
No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.
If you play against your own side you’ll lose the whole game.
The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.
History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
Pregnant women have no ethics.
The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.
This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion.
In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it.
Why hadn’t she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn’t have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.
Only what is mortal bears life, Arren. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. it is a movement – an eternal becoming.
To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
To deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
The shadow dared not follow him into a dragon’s jaws.
Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber.
Professor Barry Pennywither sat in a cold, shadowy garret and stared at the table in front of him, on which lay a book and a breadcrust. The bread had been his dinner, the book had been his lifework. Both were dry.
Endurance may outlast hope.
So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence.