He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will revolutionize the world.
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
When someone steals another’s clothes, we call him a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.
The weakness of pure individualism is that there are no pure individuals.
But plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn’t be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.
It was involuntary. They sank my boat.
Inaction may be the highest form of action.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
If I were about to start to build a platform, I think I’d start with ash.
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.
It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.
One of these days I’m going to put band-aids across my mouth so that smiling will become less of a reflex in uncomfortable situations.
Every toy has the right to break.
Do every act of your life as if it were your last.
In the palm of one hand now the rain falls. From the other the grass grows. What can I tell you?
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
