You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of i...
Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fra...
How beautiful the tragic seems when it is beneath a mask, but when it appears so nakedly before me and... when I am so forcibly implicated... I don't know whether I care for it so much. Somehow or other it is as though I were torturing myself. ("Thir...
What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I w...
Looking back, I question whether I really loved Nate, or just the security of our relationship. I wonder if my feelings for him didn’t have a lot to do with hating my job. From the bar exam through that first hellish year as an associate, Nate was ...
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly ...
Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is...
Don't talk of Life as if its one big package of miseries - it is the very Essence within that passes through both you, and your enemies and every permissible illusion. Once you're opened to, and are awakened to your TRUE NATURE, fireworks light up yo...
You view the gods as entities without," Montolio tried to explain. "You see them as physical beings trying to control our actions for their own ends, and thus you, in your stubborn independance, reject them. The gods are within, I say, whether one ha...
I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I'd once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered-if I could slip out of camp unobserved-whether I just might be ab...
I trust you. Those are the last words my father said before he left. That means that every decision I make, I would have to question myself whether it was the right one. I can picture him, expectations in his eyes. Because of that, I can see the same...
If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genet...
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food o...
Whether you’ve never meditated before or you’ve been doing it religiously for years, it is always good to evaluate (or re-evaluate) your practice. Although I’ve been meditating and teaching it for years, I still enjoy reading new information ab...
The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in th...
I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be w...
Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’v...
As in diamonds so in batting, perfection requires flawlessness and nowhere is a batting imperfection more quickly recognised than in the dropped catch. For this reason any innings worthy of consideration deserves to have all its flaws studied to esta...
The beauty of mindful-life-breath meditation is that you are not restricted to having to sit in the lotus position to be present. Whether you are on a busy train, driving a car or walking down a crowded high-street, you can easily remind yourself to ...
Animals are not supposed to have the power to reason and therefore don't care whether there is life after death. But imagine animals trying to cheer themselves up in the same way that our own ancestors did when faced with death, by believing that the...
The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagr...
