One grateful thought is a ray of sunshine. A hundred such thoughts paint a sunrise. A thousand will rival the glaring sky at noonday - for gratitude is light against the darkness.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.
The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.
Remember that your dominating thoughts attract, through a definite law of nature, by the shortest and most convenient route, their physical counterpart. Be careful what your thoughts dwell upon.
I had read once that dumb people didn't know they were dumb. They thought they were just as smart as anybody else. That was a very unsettling thought. What if I was really dumb and didn't know it?
Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.
I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.
You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized.
Whenever we suffer — no matter what the severity of our suffering is — we have the ability to find meaning in the situation.
In modern times, nationalism is the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm, and that nationalist fervor must be tapped if the drastic changes projected and initiated by revolutionary enthusiasm are to be consummated.
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.
I once saw a politician walking a dog, and I thought, “How absurd—an animal walking an animal.” Then I thought, “If given the choice, I’d rather vote for the dog.
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
One can observe that such changes in the breath are the direct result of your reaction to thoughts. If you can simply dismiss the thoughts by giving them no value then the breathing will find its own medium and become subtle.
The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.
I'd always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I'd never thought about such a thing at all. I'd simply taken it for granted.
The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.
Everyone these days is concerned so much with privacy and forgets the value of human touch. We still need each other but are scared of how it might sound or appear to the other.
