The Who Quotes (page 248)
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It is unfortunately true that there is in blasphemy a certain outlet which solaces the burdened heart. When an atheist, drawing his watch, gave God a quarter of an hour in which to strike him dead, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour of wrath and of atrocious joy. It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all celestial powers; it was a poor, wretched creature squirming under the foot that was crushing him; it was a loud cry of pain. Who knows? In the eyes of Him who sees...
Alfred de Musset
That's who Jesus Christ is. He became the final Priest and the final Sacrifice. Sinless, he did not offer sacrifices for himself. Immortal, he never has to be replaced. Human, he could bear human sins. Therefore he did not offer sacrifices for himself; he offered himself as the final sacrifice. There will never be the need for another. There is one mediator between us and God. One priest. We need no other. Oh, how happy are those who draw near to God through Christ alone.
John Piper
September has come, it is hers. Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers. Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next. Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already. So many of its days intolerable or perplexed. But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls. Dancing over and over with her shadow. Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls. And all of London littered with remembered...
Louis MacNeice
Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Eric Hoffer
Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause...
Isak Dinesen
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do (...) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first...
Leo Tolstoy
Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.
Henry David Thoreau
What it boiled down to is the strength to be able to say, 'I don't want to think about it.' Thinking negatively is the result of guilt and insecurity... You are the person who makes yourself happy. You're the person who makes yourself sad. It's much easier to feel better when you keep remembering that." [-p.481, "Caesar's Hours, My Life in Comedy with Love and Laughter", by Sid Caesar with Eddy Friedfeld, 2003]
Sid Caesar
Believers obey Christ as the one whom our obedience is accepted by God. Believers know all their duties are weak, imperfect, and unable to abide in God's presence. Therefore they look to Christ as the one who bears the iniquity of their holy things, who adds incense to their prayers, gathers out all the weeds from their duties and makes them acceptable to God.
John Owen
He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar."All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me."Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her."You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surprise."I don't want to dance with you.
Joseph Heller
From the ancient Inanna forcing herself to the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkiga? passing through the seven gates of the underworld and then being hung on a hook, rottin? where she had to look at her sister, and her sister had to look at her. Both needed to see inside themselves, to see inside their own shadows. To come to terms with who they really were, not who they thought they were.
Tori Amos
We talk about our assholes. We talk about our cocks. We talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna fuck tomorrow…Everyone tells one’s friends about that, right? So the question is, what happens when you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse? The trick is to break down that distinction, to approach your muse as frankly as you would talk to yourself, or to your friends. It’s the ability to commit to writing, to write the same way you are.
Allen Ginsberg