You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue trium...
Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.
The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.
The student asks: If my redstone necklace had every view of every veil that ever brightened, would I be wise? The master answers: If I had a thousand pieces of a priceless vase, would I be rich?
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.
The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.
Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred b...
Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.
People who's freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don't want to live like that.
As a phenomenon, life has a beginning and ending, but life itself doesn’t. So, which one is truly me - a phenomenon that lasts only between birth and death, or life itself that underlies all phenomena?
Friday night was the night most people thought they were supposed to have fun. Trouble was most people didn't know what fun was or how to have it, so things usually ended up pretty ugly.
Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.
Still, the car started, so we drove off to the movies. Popcorn happened. Previews, ads, and an annoying kid all went down like clockwork. The picture started and then ended a while later, the world unchanged by its passing.
Money almost always ends up disappointing. Buying things to give lasing satisfaction is an illusion. Money can't buy happiness. The people with the most money are often times the MOST miserable people.
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Marika could feel herself cocking the trigger of a loaded gun and pointing it at herself, because the truth could be too shocking a revelation, something that would shake their lives to the core... but lies were just a dead-end alleyway that offered ...
... time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
In life we don't always get what we want; hopes and dreams get washed away so easily, hearts are broken, chances are missed, and we always seem to end up right back where we started.
Hiking is sort of like strip poker: by the end, all the participants are hot, sweaty, and nearly naked, and the winner is the person who wore the most layers.
Don't be so quick to throw away your life. No matter how disgraceful or embarrassing it may be, you need to keep struggling to find your way out until the very end.
