I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is co...
The loss of that oral tradition and the breakdown of communication between generations had set my family adrift, floating aimlessly without history and all its accumulated experience to guide us. We need context, we need myths, we need family legends...
What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. ...
I’m going to be a model of fearlessness. And when people spew fear, I’m going to stand with an invisible shield around me and let their comments zing off my shield, and I will say to myself ‘not in my world!’ because in my world, people do ta...
Some people believe in Fate, others don't. I do, and I don't. It may seem at times as if invisible fingers move us above like puppets on strings. But for sure, we are not born to be dragged along. We can grab the strings ourselves and adjust our cour...
Most Christians seem to have two kinds of lives, their so-called real life and their so-called religious one. Not (C. S.) Lewis. The barrier so many of us find between the visible and the invisible world was just not there for him. It had become natu...
Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well know...
At the same time all the houses round about promptly took part in this silence, and so did the darkness above them, reaching as far as the stars. And the footsteps of invisible passers-by, whose course I had no wish to guess at, the wind that kept on...
That absolute, ultimate reality is always there within us (as it is everywhere else, as well). whether we are aware of it or not, it is there, like the sun shining behind the clouds, invisible because of the clouds, but undeniably there. The sun of o...
…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the t...
Siguro ganun talaga ang buhay. May mga bagay na kahit anong buhos mo ng effort o kahit gaano pa ang tindi ng kagustuhan mong makuha ay hindi mapapasaiyo kung hindi nakatakda sa isang invisible na script na kung tawagin ay tadhana.
I wondered If things that might seem frightening could lose their hold over you. I wondered If we find the people we need when we need them. I wondered If we attract our future by some sort of invisible force, or If we are drawn to it by a similar fo...
So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter ex...
It was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it - more rolled it, really - onto another target....
Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand wh...
The aim of this book is not to make atheism a popular belief or even to overcome its invisibility. My object is not utopian. It is merely to provide good reasons for being an atheist. … My object is to show that atheism is a rational position and t...
The poor are so common they're invisible, just part of the ambience of this place. I tuck a few soles under them as they sleep and walk off, feeling like a guilty tourist here for thrillseeking in a culture that's trying desperately to survive. Can s...
It hit me like divine inspiration. Religion is the greatest graft ever invented because no one ever loses money claiming to speak for the invisible man in the sky. People already believe in him. They already accept that they owe him money, and they t...
You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; ...
When I heard footsteps and saw nobody, I knew I was seeing a ghost. Seeing the invisible is like dreaming about drinking coffee to wake up, and that’s why I’ve never made love in the backseat of a car. I’ve only ever had sex in the trunk, while...
He needed so much to weep. All the distrust of life which misfortunes had brought to the little Värmland boy needed tears to wash it away. Distrust that love and joy, beauty and strength blossomed on the earth, distrust in himself, all must go, all ...
