It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes, express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing; he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.
Happiness is being able to speak the truth without hurting anyone.
To learn that one is not particularly bright, not uncommonly gifted with imagination, unwise, wild, not very kind, impatient, easily bored, rather blind, not especially sensitive, unworthy of prolonged attention — to learn these things about oneself is to be at a great advantage in terms of humility. Great pride is then possible.
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divination, perhaps we would then endure our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
If the only prayer you say in your whole life is “thank you,” that would suffice.
One does not love a place less for having suffered in it.
From suffering I have learned this: that whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless she embraces the very same love which wounded her.
Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
I’m not into isms and asms. There isn’t a Catholic moon and a Baptist sun. I know the universal God is universal. . . . I feel that the same God-force that is the mother and father of the pope is also the mother and father of the loneliest wino on the planet.
Be still Listen to the stones of the wall Be silent, they try To speak your Name. Listen To the living walls. Who are you? Who Are you? Whose Silence are you?
He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.
