Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.
I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes.
He knows what he'll find if he digs deeper. there's no rush to unpack my insides. he understands there is nothing special about emptiness, nothing interesting about depression.
I don't know how to describe it, but the more I stare at him, the more I see his grief wrapped around him like shackles he can never take off.
Half the night I waste in sighs, Half in dreams I sorrow after The delight of early skies; In a wakeful dose I sorrow For the hand, the lips, the eyes, For the meeting of the morrow, The delight of happy laughter, The delight of low replies.
Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.
When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy.
Of what are you thinking now?" she asked. "I am thinking of myself." "That's just what I am doing." "Are you also thinking of yourself?" "No, of yourself—of you, Mogens.
Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.
At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.
They didn’t agree on much. In fact, they didn’t agree on anything. They fought all the time and challenged each other ever day. But despite their differences, they had one important thing in common. They were crazy about each other.
And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other.
I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
A rewarding relationship occurs when there is a common spiritual goal, shared spiritual values and a mutual desire to build a relationship upon a spiritual foundation and for the purpose of connecting to the light of the creator.
And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect. [ ]
The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits...
The self-judging person will always judge others. The rubric we develop for ourselves, the measuring stick we put against our own mind and body, generalizes to every other human being.
the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefol...
