The Lord of man and beast is working in all; His presence is scattered everywhere; There is none else to be seen.
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them.
Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned - yet whose enormous fortune...has already brought him acquittal!
... the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.
I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.
Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.
Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from thes...
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.
I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).
If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.
At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]
They are not long, the days of wine and roses. Out of a misty dream, our path emerges for a while, then closes, within a dream.
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
The duchess turned on Eugène with one of those insolent stares that envelop a man from head to foot, flatten him out, and leave him at zero.
