Theologian Quotes

For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.

Dance until you shatter yourself.

Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others.

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending.

Once a man recognizes himself as a being surrounded by other beings in this world and begins to respect his life and take it to the highest value, he becomes a thinking being. Then he values other lives and experiences them as part of his own life. With that, his goal is to help everyone take their life to the highest value; anything which limits or destroys a life is evil. That is morality. That is how men are related to the world around them.

Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

We should love others truly, for their own sakes rather than our own.

For without you, I swear, the town Has become like a prison to me. Distraction and the mountain And the desert, all I desire.

The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.

Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

Oh sky, without me, do not change, Oh moon, without me, do not shine; Oh earth, without me, do not grow, Oh time, without me, do not go. ...Oh, you cannot go, without me.

Achieve some perfection [excellence] yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.

Every moment, the sunlightis totally empty and totally full.

To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.

If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.

There is a path from me to you that I am constantly looking for.

Love is a madman, working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, running through the mountains...

Every step I take is a blessing.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise or dispraise than it is to describe and define.

We are the Sun with all the differentkinds of Light.

Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.

Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

The event of falling in love... in one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.

Feel the delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise.

Every fragile beauty, every perfect forgotten sentence, you grieve their going away, but that is not how it is. Where they come from never goes dry. It is an always flowing spring.

Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. ... humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

I am sunlight slicing the dark.

You are the honoured guest,Do not weep like a beggarFor pieces of the world.

What draws friends together does not conform to the laws of nature.

Without doubt one is allowed to resist against the unjust aggressor to one's life, one's goods or one's physical integrity; sometimes, even 'til the aggressor's death... In fact, this act is aimed at preserving one's life or one's goods and to make the aggressor powerless. Thus, it is a good act, which is the right of the victim.

Whenever we manage to love without expectations, calculations, negotiations, we are indeed in heaven.

In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn.

The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.

On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day.

Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

You don't see your own face, your own beautyYet, no face is more beautiful than yours.......... .

Humility must accompany all our actions, must be with us everywhere; for as soon as we glory in our good works they are of no further value to our advancement in virtue.

If the extension of your compassion does not include all living beings, then you will be unable to find peace by yourself.

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

There are lovers content with longing. I’m not one of them.

The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.

...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.

Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.

Load the ship and set out. No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor. Cautious people say, 'I'll do nothing until I can be sure.' Merchants know better. If you do nothing, you lose. Don't be one of those merchants who wont risk the ocean.

But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.

Why is it that we remember with difficulty and without difficulty forget? Learn with difficulty and without difficulty remain ignorant?

Don't run away from grief, o’ soul/ Look for the remedy inside the pain/ because the rose came from the thorn/ and the ruby came from a stone.

With life as short as a half-taken breath, don't plant anything but love.

My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.