The harder we look at our aches and ailments, the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life.
The length of our life is less important than its depth.
To allow ourselves to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
There is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized: that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half well again in a day.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
There is a healthy way to be ill.
We have had for three weeks past a warm visit from the sun (my almighty physician), and I find myself almost reestablished.
Red meat and gin.
The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.
Men with faith can face martyrdom while men without it feel stricken when they are not invited to dinner.
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
Mystery on all sides! And faith the only star in this darkness and uncertainty.
Births and deaths don’t confine your life; there have been many births and many deaths. Births and deaths are just small episodes in the eternity of your life, and the moment you become aware of this eternity — another name for now, this timelessness — all fear, all anxiety about death immediately evaporates.
It is hard to have patience with people who say, “There is no death,” or, “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is, matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.
I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.
He was caught in a rare moment of contentment that did not depend on the moment that would follow.
Everybody’s heart is open . . . when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health.
Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. Everything passes away except God.
Danger past, God is forgotten.
