Always Quotes (page 246)
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[Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.
Henri Nouwen
Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life."I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think.
Jane Austen
For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end.
Italo Calvino
The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in...
Annie Dillard
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a...
Alain de Botton
There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libr?' Are you free, my daughter?"
My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.
Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.
Edwidge Danticat
do you know why Satan is so angry all the time?, Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes. So God uses wicked people as his tools? God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, Then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses. So, in the long run, God always wins? Yes, in the short run though it Can be uncomfortable.
Orson Scott Card
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.
Terry Prachett