I'm grateful to God for His bountiful gifts... He gave me courage and faith in myself.

God has been very good to me, for I never dwell upon anything wrong which a person has done, so as to remember it afterwards. If I do remember it, I always see some other virtue in that person.

Saint Teresa of Avila

As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did.

Robert Benchley

A very short trial convinced her that a curricle was the prettiest equipage in the world

Jane Austen

I knew I wanted to do something at the nexus of what I call global development and technology.

Chris Hughes

...here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart - every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.)

C.S. Lewis

But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world. As the god Amor and his figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our 'real' world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism. It is, in fine, 'the philosophy of Hermes that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, as they counterfeit some real substance in that visible fabrick'. The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given -- his own passions -- to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. To put the difference in another way, for the symbolist it is we who are the allegory. We are the 'frigid personifications'; the heavens above us are the 'shadowy abstractions'; the world which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions.

C.S. Lewis

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Aldous Huxley

The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. . . . Civilisation is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventur

Jokes are grievances.

Marshall McLuhan

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Mark Twain

Himmlisch ist's wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn's nich gelungen Hatt' ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir!Loosely translated:It is heavenly, when I overcomeMy earthly desiresBut nevertheless, when I'm not successful,It can also be quite pleasurable.

Leo Tolstoy

From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of the heart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows on a sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn, depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things; but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers can alter. To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not; to travel on a Sunday or not. Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is --the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?

Olive Schreiner