Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We become responsible for the actions of others the instant we become conscious of what they are doing wrong and fail to remind them of what is right.
Fiercely guard the passions burning inside your heart, so that their flames can safely reach the highest ceilings of success without the eyes of envy.
At the end of the day it's about how much you can bear, how much you can endure. Being together, we harm nobody; being apart, we extinguish ourselves.
He doesn't need my help coming up with pranks. He's got too many ideas of his own. - Daja referring to Briar in their first year at Discipline cottage
The first thing every mage should learn is that magic makes fools of us. Now you may call yourself a mage. You have learned the most important lesson.
True Sufism is resistance: spiritual, intellectual, social, cultural, political and economic resistance. It cannot be, for sure, supporting dictators.
You can be a very charitable capitalist. Like [Nicola] Sarkozy was saying, we have to 'moralise capitalism', which for me is a contradiction in terms.
What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable.
I put that part of myself into both Brendan and Evelyn [from The Thorn and the Blossom] - as well as some of my own anxieties about the academic life!
The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world.
The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.
So if we approach church membership from the perspective of entitlement, we have it upside down. You always ask first what you can do for your church.
There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by becoming renegades from that culture and planting the seeds for a new one.
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.
I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.
I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.
I think writers tend to hear a different message from the ones our friends and acquaintances intend. We see what's revealed, which makes us dangerous.
Usage tends to be global, while funding tends tobe local. When we allow it to happen, usage of a digital library is remarkably diverse and widespread.
I also try to weigh my motives. Am I doing what I'm doing because it's what God desires, or because I'm afraid people will be disappointed if I don't?
Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.
Close your eyes and turn your face into the wind. Feel it sweep along your skin in an invisible ocean of exultation. Suddenly, you know you are alive.
True balm [of fantasy] takes away the painful irritation of life and simply heals, allowing one to begin anew. And that is what fantasy can do for us.
You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.
A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding; and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.
We wish to become one thing or another, rather we wish to become everything and in this pursuit of becoming everything we only end up becoming idiots.
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
My mind immediately shot to South Africa the moment I sat down to think what I was going to write, what I was going to say. There was no other choice.
The real question is: if you knew there was a god, would you behave any differently? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps you should assume there is.
It struck me that our history is contained in the home we live in, that we are shaped by the ability of these simple structures to resist being defiled
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
In the early days of love sometimes, you will report an ecstatic feeling you have met someone who seems to understand you without you needing to speak.
At 'The School of Life', we take seriously anything that has to do with human fulfilment - and take note wherever insight on this subject can be found.
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.
It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do that you've forgotten about.
To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don't wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now.
Eventually we grow weary of seeking treasures outside ourselves and we begin to look within. There we discover that the gold we sought, we already are.
The difference between famous creators and struggling artists is that the creators know that improving the lives of others deserves the highest reward.
If you have to have it, it's ego. If you have to not have it, it's ego. Hold life lightly and it will deliver what you need and release what you don't.
Every musician I have ever heard has influenced me. I often find I emulate micro-aspects of an artist, and combine it to form something new and unique.
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.