Whatever you say about God you should be able to say standing over a pit full of burning babies.

Elie Wiesel

Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.

Ernest Renan

He answered nothing. If you failed to do the right thing, talk was useless.

Bernard Malamud

Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

Franz Kafka

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

James Baldwin

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever.

John Updike

You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person — you can only do one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty.

Lenny Bruce

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

Oliver Goldsmith

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

John F. Kennedy

I think one should forgive and remember. . . . If you forgive and forget in the usual sense, you’re just driving what you remember into the subconscious; it stays there and festers. But to look, even regularly, upon what you remember and know you’ve forgiven is achievement.

Faith Baldwin

It does not do you good to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Hatred is human; indifference is the final degradation of humanity.

Harvey Goldberg

The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows. . . . A thousand people drowned in floods in China is news; a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

Josephine Tey

Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thoughts all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.

Hermes Trismegistus

Guard the mysteries!
Constantly reveal them!

Lew Welch

If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.

Charles de Montesquieu

The amazing process . . . begins with the decision not to fight against our vices, not to run away from them nor conceal them, but to bring them into the light. If the desire to be honest is greater than the desire to be good or bad, then the terrific power of our vices will become manifest, and behind the vice the old forgotten fear will turn up (the fear of being excluded from life), and behind the fear the pain (the pain of not being loved), and behind this pain of loneliness the deepest and most powerful and most hidden of all human desires: the desire to love, to give oneself, and to be part of the living stream that we call brotherhood.

Fritz Kunkel

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

John Cage