Wisdom

Deceivers are the most hideous creatures in the world.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see.

Most people say use your head; I say use your heart. It will guide you closer to where you want to be. The head should be following the heart, not the other way around.

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.

Solitude is very different from a ’time-out’ from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated 'saints' who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! The root is wrapped aboutYour mother's heart, your father's bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.

The world may take your reputation from you but it cannot take your character.

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

To often we speak just to hear the sound of our own voice, when we should speak only when the words are sweeter than silence.

Mr Pickwick awoke the next morning, there was not a symptom of rheumatism about him; which proves, as Mr Bob Sawyer very justly observed, that there is nothing like hot punch in such cases; and that if ever hot punch did fail to act as a preventive, it was merely because the patient fell in to the vulgar error of not taking enough of it.

I can hear the roar of women's silence.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.

He was a product of a culture where it was generally counterproductive to hold grudges.