Natural Quotes (page 142)
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Jesus' 'lack of moral principles.' He sat at meat with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such 'appeasement'? Or was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future is built?
Dag Hammarskjold
All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling? I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn’t going to kill me: the idea...
Simone de Beauvoir
I was from birth an object of mild ridicule because of my movements - especially the perpetual flutter of my hands - and my voice. Like the voices of a number of homosexuals, this is an insinuating blend of eagerness and caution in which even such words as "hello" and "goodbye" seem not so much uttered as divulged. But these natural outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual disgrace were not enough. People could say that I was ignorant of them or was trying without success to hide...
Quentin Crisp
Lying in my heap of Earth I can naturally dream of all sorts of things, even of an understanding with the beast, though I know well enough that no such thing can happen, and at the moment when we see each other, more, at that at the instant we merely guess at each other's presence, we shall both blindly bare our claws and teeth, neither of us a second before or after the other, both of us filled with a new and different hunger, even if we should already be gorged to bursting.
Franz Kafka