He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings.
Everything can be used as a weapon, including love. My love looks like a butter knife, but I assure you, it is quite deadly. I would demonstrate, but I’m right in the middle of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so you’ll just have to bel...
...some people might think our lives dull and uneventful, but it does not seem so to us. ...it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affair...
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and...
If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility. Aided and abetted by market forces and the l...
God doesn’t take things away to be cruel. He takes things away to make room for other things. He takes things away to lighten us. He takes things away so we can fly.
[...] Just because a person has a title doesn't make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pari...
It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never...
Why do we live out every day as if there is no hope to overcome our chaos and no possibility for living a stressed-less life when Scripture repeatedly reassures us that God has the power and the peace to make that happen?
Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anaïs Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong--all of these women used the money they made from writ...
God leads us. God will do the right thing at the right time. And what a difference that makes.
. . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite a...
What if you could just invent your family, your home, your life? You could. You could call Sunday Wednesday. Be awake and living at 3 a.m. Use T-shirts instead of sheets. Eat lettuce like an apple. Blow your nose on socks. Take four unrelated people ...
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this...
Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence m...
We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better." The lady gave a discriminating smile. “I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they a...
Society's goal is to make us less foolish. From the cradle to grave the pressure is on: "Be normal!" Our inner fool may be shackled and caged by a world made to suppress it, but Jesus came to free the fool.
For just a second, Lauren wonders if she’s going insane. But insane people don’t think they’re insane, everybody knows that. But...since that fact of insanity is common knowledge, doesn’t that mean an insane person could use it to convince th...
It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign...
Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps ...
