There is no reason to learn divine truths if we do not apply them in our hearts and minds, live them out daily, and defend them in the public square when we are given the opportunity to glorify God in so doing.
One time Bonaventure heard the graphite of a pencil rasp across a piece of paper and leave a slight and quivered mark behind. He listened so hard he heard the graphite's history, when it was still a part of metamorphic rock that didn't know it would ...
Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer ...
I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for tha...
And I’ll wager you thought him the handsomest thing that ever you saw in your life.” “I did. And if you stuck him, and stuffed him, and hung him on the wall, I’d be very glad to admire him. But in life he’s an arrogant pig, and I didn’t c...
What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I w...
A nursery rhyme shapes your bones and nerves, and it shapes your mind. They are powerful, nursery rhymes, and immensely old, and not toys, even though they are for children." "But they make no sense!" Summer protested "Ah, well," said Ben. "Sometimes...
We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just a...
Touchstone watched, suddenly conscious that he probably only had five seconds left to be alone with Sabriel, to say something, to say anything. Perhaps the last five seconds they ever would have alone together. I am not afraid, he said to himself. "I...
We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.
Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.
When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perf...
This guy has a look on his face like he’s just realized that one day he will most assuredly die. Killing someone has a way of focusing our minds on our own mortality. I mean I imagine it does, and not that I’d know from personal experience.
Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable… …a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind tell...
When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up...
Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what real...
Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or w...
The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears i...
You must try to have a positive attitude. It does not matter how small a person is. One can still change the future. Size is only a state of mind. You know – it is how you use your wits that counts. Nothing can stop us, if we put our hearts into it...
I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who ...
It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at...
