Thing Quotes (page 578)

• 
• 
• 

• thinking
• world
• hard

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• acceptance
• world
• conference

I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world. W. Somerset Maugham

• question
• willfulness
• willed

The question of how things will settle down is the only important question... Leo Tolstoy

• giving
• imagination
• mediator

But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself. Nathaniel Hawthorne

• dark
• jokes
• hard

Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said. Dorothy Day

• hope
• wrong
• hopefully

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing. Dean Koontz

• reality
• world
• life

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now. T. S. Eliot

• learning
• fun
• watch

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun. Jane Goodall

• mind
• mindfulness
• participants

In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity. Baruch Spinoza

• love
• long love
• nature

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Herman Melville

• leaving
• devil
• him

Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to. Martin Luther

• god
• men
• single

When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don't know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God's eyes; as the priests said, 'All that rabble who are not experts in the Torah are accursed.' and as this pride increases, the 'subject' or study which confers such privilege will grow more and more complicated, the list of things forbidden will increase, till to get through a single day without supposed sin becomes like an elaborate... C. S. Lewis

• memories
• wind
• memorial

i see said the duke but my own idear is that these things are as piffle before the wind [from memory...] Daisy Ashford

• star
• pride
• purpose

Pride makes us long for a solution to things? a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. Julian Barnes

• work
• worked
• requirements

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. George MacDonald