We live with one another on a rare life-sustaining planet as it makes a few dozen turns around its modest and finite star. The real news on this planet is love — why it exists, where it came from, and where it’s going. How love fares against hate and indifference is the only reliable measure of historical progress that we have.
Flash, Flash, I love you, but we’ve only fourteen hours left to save the earth.
There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream — whatever that dream might be.
If hope shows the depth of sorrow, then hopelessness must cure sorrow.
A scholar was bragging to a boatman about all the knowledge he had acquired. “Can you swim?” the boatman asked. “No,” the scholar replied, “I do not know how to swim.” “Then all of your knowledge is wasted,” replied the boatman, “because the boat is sinking.”
As though your turban or your clothes were on fire, so with a sense of urgency should you apply your intellect to the comprehension of the truths.
My life had got on the wrong track and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.
Every time I see something terrible, it’s like I see it at age nineteen. I keep a freshness that way.
We wear more clothes than any people who have ever lived. We eat more different kinds of food than anyone since Louis XIV. What goes on in the corner drugstore the bazaars of Arabia couldn’t match. What we find piled at the supermarkets is the harvest of the world in all seasons at the same time. And as we push through the aisles, grabbing this and that from every corner of the globe, with the Muzak overhead, we should be the most contented people in the world. Are we?
God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.
In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord, I could not call on Him to come.
The artist Leon Kroll was having trouble with a seascape. “My boy,” said Winslow Homer, “if you want to make a great sea, use only two waves.”
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
The rain surrounded the cabin . . . with a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside. What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligent perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world. . . . Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.
When we cut flowers recklessly, carelessly, we are not paying attention to them.
You out there, so secret. What makes you think you’re alone?
