To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish.
A Pentagon official once said the people who would actually push the button probably have never seen a person die. He said the only hope — and it’s a strange thought — is if they put the button to launch the nuclear war behind a man’s heart. The President, then, with a rusty knife, would have to cut out the man’s heart, kill the man, to get to the button.
A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.
I should like to insist that nearly all the important questions, the things we ponder in our profoundest moments, have no answers.
It is popularly supposed that between those who use the word “God,” and those who do not there is a great gulf. But the gulf lies elsewhere. It lies between those who dogmatize, either positively or negatively, and those who recognize in great humility that something within them bears witness to realities which may be momentous in our lives, but which lie beyond the grasping net of our categories of thought.
In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky. . . . This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going.
In recent dreams, I have twice seen light so brilliant, so intense, that it “woke me up,” but the light did not continue into wakefulness. Which was more real, the waking or the dream?
Is sleep a mating with oneself?
Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
Better to be quarreling than lonesome.
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.
Heart, I told you before and twice, and three times, don’t knock at that door. No one will answer.
It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility, but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
I made connection with a pair of eyes, and I thought, “This is incredible; these eyes are penetrating me.” I went through the whole performance just relating to those eyes, giving the whole thing to those eyes. When curtain call finally came, I looked in the direction of those eyes, and it was a seeing eye dog. . . . I couldn’t get over it — the compassion and intensity and understanding in those eyes, and it was a dog.
Man’s mind is a mirror of a universe that mirrors man’s mind.
True love hurts. It always has to hurt. It must be painful to love someone, painful to leave them, you might have to die for them. When people marry they have to give up everything to love each other. The mother who gives birth to her child suffers much. It is the same for us in the religious life. To belong fully to God we have to give up everything. Only then can we truly love. The word “love” is so misunderstood and so misused.
Three words were in the captain’s heart. He shaped them soundlessly with his trembling lips, as he had not breath to spare for a whisper: “I am lost.” And, having given up life, the Captain suddenly began to live.
