Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Diabolical sometimes assumes the aspect of the Good, or even embodies itself completely in its form. If this remains concealedfrom me, I am of course defeated, for this Good is more tempting than the genuine Good.
It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.
The handover of power to [Dmitry] Medvedev was rather painless, everybody thought that the waves would calm automatically. By now, it's quite clear that [Vladimir] Putin doesn't want to relinquish the levers of power.
You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don't like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being.
I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It's the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America.
While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'
Always interline a contract before signing it, merely to impress the Party of the First Part. The one who puts his signature to Articles of Agreement drawn up by the other fellow is establishing a dangerous precedent.
A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge
In order to understand the movement of prices, you need not an oscilloscope to measure the entire market and reduce it to noise, but a microscope to investigate the creative process behind every company and its price.
When you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, your condition is ranked on the Gleason Score, which measures its level of aggression. Mine is graded at seven out of 10. But this doesn't tell me where I stand in general.
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry, Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die; The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide, Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.
Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards.
A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.
I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.
If faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree. Thus faith and works together grow, No separate life they never can know. They're soul and body, hand and heart, What God hath joined, let no man part.
I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.
Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.
Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.
Envy may justly be called "the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity;" it is the most acid fruit that grows on the stock of sin, a fluid so subtle that nothing but the fire of divine love can purge it from the soul.
Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same. The more things change the more I am the same. I am what I started with, and when it is all over I will be all that is left of me.
Problems assault us to the degree they preoccupy us. The key to release, rest, and inner freedom is not the elimination of all external difficulties. It is letting go of our pattern of reactions to those difficulties.
But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.
Stop. Breathe those useless breaths. Drop this piece of life you’re holding to your lips. Where are you? How long have you been here? Stop now. You have to stop. Squeeze shut your stinging eyes, and take another bite.
I was heartily sorry to leave Leh, with its dazzling skies and abounding colour and movement, its stirring topics of talk, and the culture and exceeding kindness of the Moravian missionaries. Helpfulness was the rule.
Cracks especially. You have to be careful of the cracks.. Sometimes they are disguised as something else. A doorway, or a smile or even a winking eye. And if you fall through them, you never know were you will end up.
We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.
'Nonetheless day will bring hope to me,' said Aragorn. 'Is it not said that no foe has ever taken the Hornburg, if men defended it?' 'So the minstrels say,' said Éomer. 'Then let us defend it, and hope!' said Aragorn.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
We are a little messianic about our comic books! We feel like they deserve to be more legitimate, they deserve to get more attention, they deserve to have better placement, and they deserve to have a broader audience.
But that's how life is. You never know how it's going to turn out, and you can't plan for everything. You just have to do your best dealing with things as they come and hope people forgive you when you make a mistake.
And what if in the future we're at war again, or we still haven't elected a non-white or non-male president, or the Rolling Stones are still dragging their tired old butts on stage? That would depress me way too much.
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting.
Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.
Overspending is as certain a part of the holiday season as overeating. But pushing away from both the table and the cash register at least a little bit sooner can make the post-holiday hangover hurt a little bit less.
The golden child may be the oldest one, unless it's the youngest. It may be the toughest one, unless it's the most sensitive. It's not even necessary that Mom and Dad have the same favorite - and typically they don't.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.
Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart.
As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.
I think motherhood has made issues all feel much more urgent than they did before. So it didn't necessarily change how I feel about certain things - it just fired me up to be even more active on behalf of my daughter.
I think that almost all traditional institutions are sexist, and they're probably racist and homophobic, and they're all of these things. But a lot of them, like marriage, are too embedded into the culture to give up.
Human beings, each one, right through the world, go through great agonies, the more sensitive, the more alert, the more observant, the greater the suffering, the anxiety, the extraordinary sense of insoluble problems.