The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. ... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason?
I am mentally bifocal.
No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."
You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.
The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.
It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.
You are right,” he had said. “Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself.” That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.
There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.
Vermont is a country unto itself.
War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.
I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.
I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women - certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.
French is the most beautiful,” he said, “and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.
The melting-pot idea is futile ... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.
At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man's pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.
Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.
I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence.
For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth.
In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.
For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.
Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.
God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.
Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.
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