philosophical

If then the power of speech is as great as any that can be named,__f the origin of language is by many philosophers considered nothing short of divine__f by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated,__f by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other,__f such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and the prophets of the human family__t will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study: rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others__e they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life__ho are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence.

The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

It's in out-of-the-ordinary situations - especially situations of challenge or adversity - that the most important differences between people shine through.

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain.

Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

How do I know that what I see as blue and what you see as blue are the same thing? Answer: We don't. We take it on faith.

We don't think. We think we think.

If you knew in advance that something momentous and terrible would happen you__ make an effort to imprint it all in your mind, wouldn__ you, every detail. But of course you don__ know. And perhaps that__ just as well.

Mrs Beaumont shrugged. __ougie travelled light in life,_ she said. __e knew it was people who were important.

You cannot become what you already are.

This Self is never born, nor does It die. It did not spring from anything, nor did anything spring from It. This Ancient One is unborn, eternal, everlasting. It is not slain even though the body is slain.

...something important is lost if this man has been forced to deny his own nature.

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.

I seen women take this kind a' help from a man with a look a' relief on their faces. I wondered if these women knew how much easier their lives would be if they did all this stuff for themselves.

Of course, the abolition of Hell meant that such thoughts were now the merest fantasy. Isobel was agnostic as to what, if anything, lay in store for us after this life; that there was a world of spirit seemed to her to be a possibility that we should not exclude. Consciousness was an elusive entity about which we knew very little, other than that it came into existence when certain conditions were present- a sufficient mass of brain cells operating in a particular way. But could we really say much more than that about where it was located & whether it could survive in other conditions? The fact that a plant grew in one place did not mean that it could not grow in another. And if something lay behind this consciousness, orchestrated it & and the conditions that produced it, then why should we not call this something God?

Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.