Least Quotes (page 84)
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
Blaise Pascal
To square the records, however, it should be said that if the Calvinist does not rise as high, he usually stays up longer. He places more emphasis on the Holy Scriptures which never change, while his opposite number (as the newspapers say) tends to judge his spiritual condition by the state of his feelings, which change constantly. This may be the reason that so many Calvinistic churches remain orthodox for centuries, at least in doctrine, while many churches of the Arminian persuasion often...
Aiden Wilson Tozer
So I'm not crazy after all! I thought it looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first grader or a concentration camp survivor. What's this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.
Haruki Murakami
To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again...books which I have read carefully a few years before. I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.
Michel de Montaigne
No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't...
Mark Helprin
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literatur? at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come? is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.
Lewis Carroll
It is arguable that when Humanists, "Shook off," as people say, "the trammels of religion," and discovered things of this world as objects of veneration in their own right... they began to lose the finer appreciation of even the world itself. Thus to the Christian centuries, the flesh was holy (or sacer at least in one sense or the other), and they veiled its awful majesty; to the Humanist centuries it was divine in its own right, and they exhibited it. Now it is the commonplace of the...
Dorothy L. Sayers
The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no function at all but to express or stimulate emotion, or both. And an examination of them soon convinces us that in them we see language at its least linguistic. We have come to the frontier between language and inarticulate vocal sounds. And at that frontier we find a...
C. S. Lewis