Life Is Quotes (page 339)
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
C. S. Lewis
Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.
Bram Stoker
For there is not a single humanbeing, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being canbe explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry bythe artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or athousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, suchas the body and the spirit, the saint and the...
Herman Hesse
But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.
J. B. Priestley
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
Frederick Buechner
There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things.
Fulton J. Sheen
The reason why I consider myself a clever man is simply because I could never in my life finish anything I'd started. All right, I am a talker, a harmless, boring talker as we all are. But what can I do if the direct and sole purpose of every intelligent man is to talk, that is to say, to waste his time deliberately?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The test of man then is not, 'How have I believed?' but 'How have I loved?'. The final test of religion is not religiousness, but love: not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the Spirit of Christ, the...
Paulo Coelho
what a book this is, and what lessons there are in it! What a book is Holy Scripture, what a miracle and what a strength is given to man with it! Like a sculpture composed of the world, of man and human characters, and it has all been named and explained for the ages, ever more. And how many mysteries are resolved and revealed..." (Concerning Holy Scripture in the Life of Fr. Zosima)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
Susan Sontag