Itself Quotes (page 81)
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To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.
Alan Moore
I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.
Henri Bergson
What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood, is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of offense? And what's in prayer but this twofold force, to be forestalled ere we come to fall, or pardoned being down? Then I'll look up. My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer can serve my tern? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?
William Shakespeare
There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to...
Colleen McCullough
The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb, which will answer our prayers [...] it takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. But when Rimbaud walked out the back door, doom had already announced itself.
Henry Miller
The brutes do not admire each other. A horse does not admire his companion. Not that there is no rivalry between them in a race, but that is of no consequence; for, when in the stable, the heaviest and most ill-formed does not give up his oats to another as men would have others do to them. Their virtue is satisfied with itself.
Blaise Pascal
Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good.
C. S. Lewis
It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of
David Foster Wallace