We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul.

Robert Musil

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.

Archbishop Dom Helder Camara

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

Albert Camus, The Plague

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others

We must seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness.

Meister Eckhart

Without mystical experience, religion is a corpse.

William McNamara

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Die in your thoughts every morning and you will no longer fear death.

Hagakure

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness we repent of, but our severity.

George Eliot

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.

Harriet Ward Beecher

Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot. . . . I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Love is not hasty to deliver us from temptation, for Love means that we be tried and purified.

Mary Baker Eddy

Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.

Alan Keightley

Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honor, pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?

Taisen Deshimaru

May I ask you a highly personal question? It’s what life does all the time.

Kurt Vonnegut

During Einstein’s stay in Zurich, Paulette Brupbacher asked the whereabouts of his laboratory. With a smile, he took a fountain pen out of his breast pocket and said, “Here.”

Carl Seelig in A.P. French, Einstein: A Centenary Volume

Another way to approach the thing is to consider it unnamed, unnameable.

Francis Ponge

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down. We don’t move, today is today, always is today.

Octavio Paz

Religion has made us meditate constantly on the crucifixion and never on the resurrection.

D.H. Lawrence

We die, and we do not die.

Shunryu Suzuki

          You know
That if you were for a time in mortal danger,
And are so still, it was not from a stranger.

Howard Nemerov, Nightmare

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.

Antonio Porchia

By the time you read this, it is dark on the next page.

W.S. Merwin