The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to r...
Music is more powerful than reason in the soul. That is also why Plato made music the very first step in his long educational curriculum: good music was to create the harmony of soul that would be a ripe field for the higher harmony of reason to take...
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions...
None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt; it was all I could do...
I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and thei...
Life is plenty pointless. We're all put here on this earth, such a minuscule thing, really. This tiny Earth, in the midst of an ever-larger universe. We were put here for reasons unbeknownst to us, reasons that may not even exist. And, above all that...
The theology of littleness is a basic category of Christianity. After all, the tenor of our faith is that God's distinctive greatness is revealed precisely in powerlessness. That in the long run, the strength of history is precisely in those who love...
There is only one thing to do when you meet the Living God; you must fall on your face and repent of your sins. Repentance is bittersweet business; Repentance is not just a conversion exercise -- it is the posture of the Christian, much like 'tree' o...
In 2002, after the huge success of Who Moved my Cheese? a management manual that sold 1.6million copies in China, there was a rush of books inspired by it. Titles included Whose Cheese Should I Move?; Can I Move Your Cheese?; Who Dares to Move my Che...
Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, ‘Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can’t talk about cannibalism!’ The other is to s...
In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there ...
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little p...
For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshiped, for it...
Do unto others…’ is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is - a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I�...
The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into...
His child. His child with Caroline. Their child. After the things he’d said to her this morning, this would likely be their only child. Would it be a little bespectacled boy who wore his clothes haphazardly and followed his papa around holding a ma...
It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg ...
Though I love you to the core of my being, so thoroughly that every cell comprising me aches to be near you, I must accept that we can never be together. For our existence parallels the sun and the moon—a temptation in constant, beautiful view, yet...
There are some who would vow that life isn’t fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It’s true, there are storms that shake our foundations and monsters that thre...
Your love renders you impatient and disturbed. With such sincerity you have placed your head at her feet that you are oblivious to the world. When in the eyes of your beloved riches don't count, gold and dust are as one to you. You say that she dwell...
I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider y...
