Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
It is our investment in Karma Savings and Loan that keeps us in bondage.
How hard it is to escape from places! However carefully one goes, they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences, little rags and shreds of your very life.
There is no stopping place in this life — nor is there ever one for any man, no matter how far along his way he’s gone.
God is always opening his hand.
God is more glorified by a man who uses the good things of this life in simplicity and with gratitude than by the nervous asceticism of someone who is agitated about every detail of his self denial. . . . His [the latter’s] struggle for perfection becomes a kind of battle of wits with the Creator who made all things good.
Why do you assume that an existence that does not succeed in taking root or bearing fruit in the form of a tangible work is less valuable than another? Why might not the world, which has need for stable families and settled people, need also these mobiles and wandering creatures whose action takes the form of series of seemingly unrelated trials or tests cutting across all kinds of areas? . . . . We must, to a certain extent, look for a stable port, but if Life keeps tearing us away, not letting us settle anywhere, this in itself may be a call and a benediction.
Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in the retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal. . . . When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in prison, I feel I lose my fire, my color. Writing should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.
Boredom is simply another word for fear, especially a fear of giving yourself.
What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea. The difference between a seed and an inert speck can be hard to see, but only one of them will grow and return itself in kind and be multiplied.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
The key to the world is humility. Without it all hustling, listening, watching is in vain.
It is nearly fifty years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.
And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible.
Any old woman can love God better than a doctor of theology can.
All the powers work so that you should come to a bad ending, but our soul works for the opposite — that the ending should be good. Actually, the ending is always good.
