Life is too hard to maintain a constantly serious outlook. You have to laugh at yourself and the world now and then―see humor in undesirable circumstances, even harsh situations―or you will either rot from the inside or go stark-raving mad. Humor...
I look forward to seeing you in the “jungle” as our warriors meet and join the battle drum that calls for unity in the struggle for breaking the chains of modern slavery—like the butterflies flying the skies and the birds over the seas, all are...
Perhaps more than never, in a highly globalized world, we must recognize that multiculturalism is not simply understanding ethnic/racial histories or the mere appreciation of cultural “difference,” but accepting that multiculturalism spreads acro...
To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on yo...
A fine young man and a fine young felly he always was, except that in the old days, before you began coming in here, Mr. Witherwax, he maybe had too much money and spent too much of it on girls. Take them alone, either one; the money without the wome...
You undo me, Merit. Wholly and completely. You don't take me at my word. You challenge me at every opportunity. And that means when I'm with you, I am less than the head of this House...and I am more than the head of this House. I am a man." He strok...
Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it's no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are t...
I do believe Jesus died so we could feel freed up to go after life to the full, so we would feel equpped to take risks and not beat ourselves up when we fail. He didn't die to make our lives look perfect. He died so we could stop feeling as if our li...
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people ...
It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty b...
I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second you were born, the t...
Remember that in life, everything that you want is outside of your comfort zone. Because if something is inside your comfort zone, it's either something you already have or something so trivial as to be undesirable: you don't want something you alrea...
The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man...As long as we perpetuate the...
If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is st...
No, I have never had a problem finding books to read. But I have had a problem finding people who understand what it's like to really LOVE reading. Maybe even need it. People who associate periods of their life with the kinds of things they were read...
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having b...
...the only way out consists of using a social mask. This is why those under depression will smile more as well as make efforts to please and entertain compared to anyone else. ... If they could hide in public, and they do hide in other ways, both ps...
Oh! if, when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance...
If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitous man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his s...
But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the...
The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to...
