The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in...
Here upon earth there is life, and then death, Dawn, and later nightfall, Fire, and the quenching of embers: But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part of the world, If the idea fits my fancy?
<...> this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.
Keep driving," said a soft voice in my ear. "She will not bite if you keep driving." Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking Captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck.
It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bother...
We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses.
If you can change the way you think in time you will notice a change in your heart and also a change in your life and the way you see things.
I don't believe the idea of Fate is that everything in our lives is predetermined. For me, it's those moments when, on reflection, Life seems to have intervened and given us a friendly or not-so-friendly nudge in another direction.
With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task)...
Besides, I don’t understand people who read a book for pleasure and then ruminate on the book’s ideas. Paper was invented so we wouldn’t have to keep all those thoughts in our heads.
Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.
For twenty years I strove to free myself from what I retained of my education; I indulged my curiosity by reading books less to learn than to efface from my memory the ideas that had been thrust upon it.
The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious.
You did what you did out of love. I can't be mad at you over that. It was stupid, but that's how love is. Do you have any idea what I'd do for you? To keep you safe?
I might not yet be falling in love, but I might be flirting with the promise of love, the idea of love, the making of a place in my heart for love, though it may have been more a wish than a promise.
He knew from experience that true and obvious ideas, such as the ineffable wisdom and judgment of the Great God Om, seemed so obscure to many people that you actually had to kill them before they saw the error of their ways...
How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
Any idea why there is a giant penis made out of snow in our front yard?" Instead of an answer, I was rewarded with a face full of graham cracker cereal and milk." - from Of Cheerleaders and Gingers
Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.
What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?' 'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.
During intellectual droughts one shower of good ideas can cause a flash-flood to wash away the roads your habits travel.
