Wisdom

When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.

...If you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that 'I have had two pains'.

Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories.

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

I” gives birth to mind; Mind gives birth to ego,Ego gives birth to sense of separation,From where originates suffering and sorrow.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.

Those who try and fail are much wiser than those who never try for fear of failure.

Old age ain't no place for sissies.

Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid.

Ignorance’ (absence of Self-Knowledge) creates vibrations (causes) and ‘Knowledge’ (Self-Knowledge) stops these vibrations.

A gourmet is just a glutton with brains.

There's an old saying,' Buck said. 'A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty of them you're a damn genius.

Circumstances makes a thing poison or nectar. There is nothing absolute good or bad.

If we let the drama of others’ lives become our own, then we are no longer ourselves. We become the reflections of others’ dramas and their lives, their tragedies, and their misfortunes become our own.

The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

FRANCISCUS: How sweetly she looks! Oh, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy.

Ghosts are just our minds telling us that subconsciously we feel guilty about something we should have done, would have done, but never took the time!

Opportunities present themselves only to the patient, man and beast, and only they take advantage of those opportunities.

A writer leads a hyphenated-life with words.