But that's life. That's your education. A series of opportunities and missed opportunities. Exams and grades and blue books and blue balls and majors and minors and liberal arts and liberal minds. The scam of it is, no matter how much you paid or how...
The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes be...
You'll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of christian children.' This was all said cheerfully. 'How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of c...
The cow-shaped cookies have a beef flavoring, the turkey-shaped cookies have a poultry flavoring, and..." Jane held up one of the cookies. "Human-flavored?" Meg stifled a sigh. That would be the first thing on her feedback list: don't make people-sha...
Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that i...
You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day...
The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters. Successful people just do the things that seem to make no difference in the act of doing them and they do them over and over and over until the compound effe...
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be ve...
Now that Olive was grown, I didn't know what to do with myself. You could build your life around one single thing, like a view or a child, but that was risky. You had so much to lose.
Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity fro...
He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying ...
They talk about human rights until the rights include things they personally do not like as alternatives. There needs to be Frank discussions. And Shirley can join too because the pun works. The ideas of human beings of all demeanor and venues are at...
Willadee asked him if he thought maybe it should say HAPPY EVER AFTER, but Samuel said no, he thought happiness was like any other miracle. The more you talked about it, the less people believed it was real. It was like Swan said, some things, everyb...
Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids- to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted at to get things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time- ti...
If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in hi...
It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose...
Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.' I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I h...
Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they ...
I wasn't saying whatever they're saying I was saying. I'm sorry I said it really. I never meant it to be a lousy anti-religious thing. I apologize if that will make you happy. I still don't know quite what I've done. I've tried to tell you what I did...
It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ...
Though we have rightly applauded our ancestors for their spiritual achievements (and do not and must not discount them now), those of us who prevail today will have done no small thing. The special spirits who have been reserved to live in this time ...
