Goodness Quotes (page 352)
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them? the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms? and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air? the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere? despite the absence in the room of...
Bret Easton Ellis
These Souls with great Material Possessions were allowed this because of Past Good Works in their Previous Life, but now feel there is no need for Spiritual Progress. They are too easily forgetting why they were granted this Material Wealth in the first place. Therefore we must stop them from accumulating more Material Gains to Guide them back to the right path.
Mary Todd Lincoln
If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is...
Wendell Berry
She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.
Marcel Proust
Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the...
Ludwig von Mises
I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I? as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again? it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul.
L. M. Montgomery
I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar. And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two...
Joyce Cary