I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.
Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.
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.
I have never paid for fornication, and I don't intend to begin with you. When you come to me, and come to me you shall, you shall do so of your own accord and wholly free of all commerce and custom.
The city had seemed grand to him once ... it had once had a certain clarity. When you're young you think it's the clarity that's intoxicating; later you realize you were only ever drunk on your own vision.
For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.
They are from another world, another way of life that somehow has merged with our own. These worlds are kept separate for the safety of everyone." "And yet, I connect them." "You do.
Ah well, I suppose that's the problem with trying to make others follow your own beliefs: what starts out as spiritual ardor too often becomes arrogance and bigotry.
God's Word is especially suited to directing those who want to focus primarily on the nature and direction of their own hearts.
I’m sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands,” Kitteredge said. “He’s a friend of the family.” So that’s it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.
Don’t underestimate the dreams everyone has; you have no knowledge about the one that would later marry your own. Be each other’s keeper and know that beautiful dreams date only beautiful dreams!
The crocodiles that frighten from crossing the rivers of our destinies are easily drowned with personal confidence but not team courage. It means you owe it to yourself to defeat your own crocodiles and cross over to the other side!
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's...
The best way of keeping a low profile was to immerse himself in the mundane. Act like them, talk like them. A smile, a joke was all it took - at least during the day. The night was his own.
In the silence I heard Bastet, who had retreated under the bed, carrying on a mumbling, profane monologue. (If you ask how I knew it was profane, I presume you have never owned a cat.)
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the deat...
'If life is pain, one could say that killing is an act of compassion. I look forward to my own death, you know. But dying is like losing you virginity. You can only do it once. I'm saving it for the right moment.'
Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries.
The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don't say it wasn't.
The most intelligent people disguise the fact that they are intelligent. Wise men do not wear nametags. The more people talk about their own skills, the more desperate they are—their work should speak for itself.
You have the right to create an appealing future for yourself; you also have the right to build up an appalling brand. Whichever, you own the value you create.
