Which Quotes (page 386)
It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.
Christopher Hitchens
But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.
Charles Bukowski
If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which...
Aldous Huxley
It is undeniable that the source of all our miseries comes from our obstinacy in maintaining that Paradise is a garden. The psychoanalysts have added to the confusion by interpreting the floating dreams as a flight into space. The mystic is the only one who knows that all states of ecstasy are a state of floating in an ambiance more heavy than air. Paradise is at the bottom of the sea, and I can also prove to you that angels are ships. They have no wings but large sails which they unfold...
Anais Nin