Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
Real worship involves waiting.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.
Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
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