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"I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches."
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"Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all..."
Psychology
"There's a patter in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object."
Philosophy
"She knew there were words so terrible you heard them with your whole body. Guilty. And there were voices to say them. She knew there were people you might almost trust who would hear them, too, and be amazed, and still not really hear them because they know they were not the ones the words were spoken to."
Psychology
"What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?"
Society
"She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse."
Spiritual
"When I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly."
Relationship
"In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?"
Emotion
"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."
Memory
"I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows."
Life
"I should leave, she told herself once or twice, to savor the thought of their surprise, their regret. What a childish idea. Then Jack would leave, no doubt, so that should would come back, as she would have to do, and her father would be plunged in sorrow of which she was directly the cause, and which would not end in this life."
Emotion
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"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."
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Personal Development
"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."
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Personal Development
"But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting."
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Personal Development
"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
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Personal Development
"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."
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Personal Development
"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."
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Personal Development
"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
Author Name
Personal Development
"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
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Personal Development
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