We need much less than we think we need.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
For too long I have silenced my heart, that now, when I give it the opportunity to speak, it no longer remembers its voice. Locked away, it forgot what it’s like to be free; to roam. Imprisoned within loneliness, I fear Stockholm syndrome has developed.
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
All those moments are alive in us today. We may not visit them anymore, very often, but we carry them in our DNA, our blood, our bones; informing the breadth and beauty of who we now are; our lesson to be lived.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.
If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
The money men make lives after them.
Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.
Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
