Laugh till you weep. Weep till there’s nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it’s all one.
You know what they say about love and war… One is a lot of physical and psychological pain, and the other is war.
If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
The deep need of man is the need to overcome separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.
Aren’t you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: “May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.” But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.
Because he loved true things he tried to explain.
Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I hit the switch, lowering the windows, and saw mountains reared near Mexico, lyrical in themselves and beautifully named, whatever their names, because you can’t name a mountain badly, and I looked for a sign that would point me home.
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
People will show you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect, and it is these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions she wasn’t all she should be. I love her, and that’s the beginning of everything.
We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.
If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.
With the certainty of order in earlier ages, life was fresh and meaningful, and man’s aspirations counted for something. But modern man seemed suddenly to have been placed in a desert world with no sense of direction.
