The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothin...
I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory "making out" and "sleeping around," we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom i...
If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.
Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.
The loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable - that one false step involves in her endless ruin - that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful - and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the ...
You cannot kill or steal from a man while he is asleep and heartbroken. While it is said that everything is fair in love an war, the dictum is nullified when both love and war occur simultaneously...
The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can, and for this they will be praised not blamed; but when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is folly and blame.
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of r...
I drank the dregs of the wine to what remained of my health. I gave the last of my fervor for what remained of my hope. I cannot say for sure that this country is cursed, Honey flows with the milk, and the milk might curdle. Eli7
...One cannot help but consider the future- what will it be like when all the wild places of the earth have been taken over by civilization, and there is no more room for Indians, Pirates, and Wild Boys?
You cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that's left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.
One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.
I can’t reveal the mystery to either saint or sinner; I can’t state at length what I’ve said curtly; I achieve an altered state that I can’t explain; I have a secret that I cannot share.
Look at the sky. Does its sapphire hue dim when you take a single breath? Are the stars drawn closer when you weep? The sky cannot be diminished so. Thus it is with the spirit: it is a thing without beginning or end.
The conundrum of sanity and insanity, is that it serves us to be some of each. It's really only a question of degrees. You cannot possibly be 100% adjusted and live in this INSANE world. A little bit of crazy is a coping skill.
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.
As we change, we sometimes outgrow our friendships. And, since we cannot change this fact, it is best to simply accept it for what it is in order to appreciate the power that the friend had in your life when he or she was a part of it.
We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They are like road maps that show us which way to go.
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
I wrote you, you are mine," it continued, its voice as hard as its diamond eyes. "But I do not write everything you do and think. I do not write every decision you make. Not because I cannot-but because I .
