Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.

Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.

William Law

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Charles Simic

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who

Christopher Hitchens

The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.

Nikolai Berdyaev

Whatever her name was, she was pretty. She had a thick, careless braid of chestnut hair, a quick smile, and dark, merry eyes. She wore some kind of a fuzzy lavender pullover, and when she crossed her legs and lifted her guitar onto her lap, she had an interesting way of tucking the foot of the bottom leg back under her chair that made Hector feel melty. He looked away in self-preservation.

Lynne Rae Perkins

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thought is made in the mouth.

Tristan Tzara

Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong, my dear. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Paulo Coelho

I live on a one-way street that's also a dead end. I'm not sure how I got there.

Steven Wright

He has the power who the majority believe in.

Raupach

La suprema dicha de la vida, es la convicción de que se es amado; amado por sí mismo, digamos mejor, ama¬do a pesar de sí mismo.

Victor Hugo

The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love

Helen Shucman