All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.

George Bernard Shaw

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

Theodore Roethke

Bringing Thoughts 2 Life

Brooklen Borne

The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.

Confucius

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

Lawrence M. Krauss

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

Erica Jong

They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality has a name. . . . It is conscious and alert, it does things like dining out, answering letters, etc., and it differs vividly and amusingly from other personalities. The lower personality is a very queer affair. In many ways it is a perfect fool, but without it there is no literature, because unless a man dips a bucket down into it occasionally he cannot produce first-class work. There is something general about it. Although it is inside S. T. Coleridge, it cannot be labelled with his name. It has something in common with all other deeper personalities, and the mystic will assert that the common quality is God, and that here, in the obscure recesses of our being, we near the gates of the Divine. It is in any case the force that makes for anonymity. As it came from the depths, so it soars to the heights, out of local questionings; as it is general to all men, so the works it inspires have something general about them, namely beauty. The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read. What is so wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse. Lost in the beauty where he was lost, we find more than we ever threw away, we reach what seems to be our spiritual home, and remember that it was not the speaker who was in the beginning but the Word.

E. M. Forster, Anonymity: an Enq

I spent millons of years in the worldof inorganic thingsas a star, as a rock...Then I died and became a plant--Forgetting my former existencebecause of its othernessThen I died and became an animal--Forgetting my life as a plantexcept for inclinations in the seasonof spring and sweet herbs--like the inclination of babestoward their mother's breastThen I died and became a humanMy intelligence ripened, awakeningfrom greed and self-seekingto become wise and knowingI behold a hundred thousandintelligences most marvelousand remember my former statesand inclinationsAnd when I die againI will soar past the angelsto places I cannot imagineNow, what have I ever lost by dying?

Rumi, What Have I Ever Lost By D

People should know what you stand for. They should also know what you won't stand for.

Source Unknown

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

Sydney Pollack

No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.

Phyllis Schlafly

She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.

Gilbert Parker