If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.