The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

John le Carre

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

Sinclair Lewis, on sightseeing

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Edmund Burke

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Charles Kingsley

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

George Bernard Shaw

The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Kurt Vonnegut

Past boldness is no assurance of future boldness. Boldness demands continual reliance on God's spirit.

Andy Stanley

Once the soul has left the body it had to walk across a bridge as narrow as a knife edge, with paradise on the right and, on the left, a series of circles that lead down into the darkness inside the earth. Before crossing the bridge, each person had to place all his virtues in his right hand and all his sins in his left, and the imbalance between the two meant that the person always fell towards the side to which his actions on Earth had inclined him.

Paulo Coelho

But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor.

Thomas a Kempis

Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

Logan Pearsall Smith