Life Quotes (page 514)
Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd. As herds of bellowing buses drive by. Love's anguish tightens your throat. As if you were never to be loved again. If you lived in the old days you would enter a monastery. You are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayer. You make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles. The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your life. It's a painting hanging in a dark museum. And sometimes you go and look at it...
Guillaume Apollinaire
[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
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly...
Aldous Huxley
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
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to...
Ralph Ellison