“Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?”
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
“I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.”
Dorothy Day in The Long Loneliness (1952)
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”
Herman Melville
“Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
George Costanza (Jason Alexander) in The Seinfeld Show episode “The Beard”, quoted by John Stewart on “The Daily Show”, February 23, 2012
“…the sanest individuals among us, the people most fully in touch with the reality of our mortal nature and flimsy constructs of meaning and purpose, are those whom fear and depression have reduced to states of catatonic paralysis. The rest of us who go blithely about our routines, oblivious to the fleeting quality of our arc through space and time, inhabit a fictional world, the insane realm of denial.”
from Frederick Neidner’s Barely Enough: Manna in the Wilderness of Depression, in The Christian Century, January 18, 2012, quoting Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death.
We are all pencils in the hand of God.
Mother Teresa, quoted in the independent documentary film “God in the Box”, screened at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, 2011
If women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
Red Green (Steve Smith) on the The Red Green Show (S&S Productions, CBC Television)
If [man] is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant
He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never therefore make any progress.
Muhammed Anwar El Sadat
Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord put his spirit upon them.
Moses, in Numbers 11:29 (JPS)
We have to ‘leave home,’ in a sense, leave our comfortable ways of being, to find ourselves and our calling. We need to develop a passionate discontent, an anger that picks us up and shakes us by the neck and will not let us go. The Holy Spirit, you know, is not on the side of order and stability.
Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell, Unitarian Universalist minister
One of the games to which [the human race] is most attached is called “Keep tomorrow dark,” and which is also named . . . “Cheat the prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904
Why think? We have computers to do that for us.
Jean Rostand, French biologist and philosopher
Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try and find anything. We must simply hold out and win through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with one another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, 1605
When your job is shoveling shit, your whole life revolves around your breaks.
Amy Dumas, professional wrestler, in Lita: A Less Traveled R.O.A.D. – The Reality of Amy Dumas (2003)
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
Thomas Merton, essay “Conscience, Freedom and Prayer” from No Man Is an Island (1955)
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince (1943)
I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something.
Gene Roddenberry
The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self awareness.
Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in “Bull Durham” (MGM, 1988)
Half the world does not know the joys of wearing cotton underwear.
Phil Gramm, US Senator and Presidential candidate, promoting US cotton exports, as quoted in Time, 1996
Those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind” (1938)
There’s a saying that a Pilgrim that travels to Mecca for the Hajj should leave the Holy City quickly, so as not to get attached to it.
Zain Verjee, Canadian journalist (CNN)
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin
The wise have no mind of their own, finding it in the minds of ordinary people.
They’re good to good people and they’re good to bad people. Power is goodness. They trust people of good faith and they trust people of bad faith. Power is trust.
They mingle their life with the world, they mix their mind up with the world. Ordinary people look after them. Wise souls are children.
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula LeGuin, Shambala, 1998
I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.
Agent Smith, The Matrix, (Warner Bros., 1999)
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
Peggy Noonan, speech writer for presidents Reagan and Bush, 1996
And those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Never refuse wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn’t drink must be an alcoholic.
P.J. O’Rourke, Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Bertrand Russell
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke
The loneliest part of your body … is your mind.
Frank Zappa (1941-1993)
A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises. An optimist gets nothing but unpleasant ones.
Nero Wolfe
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
Yoda, Jedi master, in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (20th Century Fox, 1980)
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
You know that what we are afraid of is not so much our limitations but the infinite within us.
Nelson Mandela, quoted by John O’Donohue on “Being” episode “The Inner Landscape of Beauty” (November 25, 2010)
Man is a messenger who forgot the message.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The more I’ve been thinking about this, the more it seems to me actually is that the visible world is the first shoreline of the invisible world. And the same way I believe with the body and the soul. That actually the soul — the body is in the soul, not the soul just in the body. And that in some way the poignance of being a human being is that you are the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive in some way.
John O’Donohue (1956-2008) on “Being” episode “The Inner Landscape of Beauty” (November 25, 2010)
People who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
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