At first, I could lie about my lack of sleep and she’d fall for it, but she started suspecting insomnia when I began seeing purple elephants in the air vents at the office. I knew I shouldn’t have asked her about them. I thought maybe she’d redecorated.
When your mother asks, Do you want a piece of advice? it’s a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.
Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.
When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?
Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying ‘I don’t want to die.’ That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.
People without firmness of character love to make up a fate for themselves; that relieves them of the necessity of having their own will and of taking responsibility for themselves.
I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.
One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.
Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.
You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.
This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn’t just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.”
[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
Every man must decide for himself whether he shall master his world or be mastered by it.
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore. And if you’re not either people think there is something wrong with you….but there is nothing wrong with me
It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and -what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.
No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.
Take what comes and live life without complaint. What will be, will be. Life is a woman’s gift; death is God’s.
The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.
I would rather spend one lifetime with you, than face all the ages of this world alone.
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.
[Quoting Reverend Phillips Brooks, during Remarks at Presidential Prayer Breakfast, February 7 1963]
To call yourself a “realistic” person is intensely arrogant and naïve.
Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you go, and fix it along the way…
For Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and Passion, unattended,is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
A: The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul.
Q: It always happens?
A: If we’re lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind.
Q: Instead of watching out?
A: Instead of always watching out.
My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that’s walked,
A song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke,
When I think about myself.
A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, Why is there so much suffering?Suzuki Roshi replied, No reason.
You wanted to lick my face the first time you saw me? Is that usually what you do when you’re attracted to guys?” I shake my head. “Not your face, your dimple. And no. You’re the only guy I’ve ever had the urge to lick.” He smiles at me confidently. “Good. Because you’re the only girl I’ve ever had the urge to love.
One time I actually cleaned out my closet so good I ended up on the cover of Time magazine.
He’s dozed off again, but I kiss him awake, which seems to startle him. Then he smiles as if he’d be happy to lie there gazing at me forever.
The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the thoroughness of his understanding.
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
‘Hamlet’ is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what’s real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.
Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält.
I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.
You’re not a woman, he said finally. You’re the Grim Reaper with red hair!
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
Cancer taught me to stop saving things for a special occasion. Every day is special. You don’t have to get cancer to start living life to the fullest. My post-cancer philosophy? No wasted time. No ugly clothes. No boring movies.
I have goals and ambitions, and I see myself as a lifelong baseball student. I have certain philosophies that I’d like to test at some point at the big league level. The job of manager appeals to me, a coach appeals to me, at a different time frame.
My love is meatloaf flavored. I just wish my meatloaf was also meatloaf flavored.
The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Create a vision for the life you really want and then work relentlessly towards making it a reality.
FDR Unmasked is first to present convincing evidence of Roosevelt’s battle with prostate cancer, underpinned by FBI memoranda and reliable firsthand information from multiple physicians – even a shocking admission by Eleanor Roosevelt to actress Veronica Lake that her husband was being treated for the disease.
Oh, we’re playing nice now? Shall we have tea first? Brew up a nice pot of kiss-my-ass?
There are any number of magical creatures, mostly female, whose singing can bring about horror and death. Sirens, undines, banshees, Bananarama tribute bands…