Religion enables us to ignore nothingness
and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
Poetry, thoughts, and quotations to help get us through the night.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness
and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
These are times in which a genius would wish to live.
It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose
of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.
Great necessities call out great virtues.
When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart,
then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant,
wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Quincy Adams
The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge,
or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory,
but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing:
Sacred Awe!
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power.
Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world,
and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
William Shakespeare, As You Like It