Unless Quotes (page 26)
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Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at...
C. S. Lewis
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
Haruki Murakami
The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle? a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak? and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as...
Mikhail Bakunin
Whatever people say, the state called 'being in love' usually does not last ... But, of course, ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God ... This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies.
C. S. Lewis
In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariable begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: a verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author’s impulse complete. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said)
C. S. Lewis
Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own...
Ayn Rand
A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.
Thomas Merton