We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
Real worship involves waiting.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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