"When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on worship
4 fans of this quote   

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on christians and christianity
6 fans of this quote   

"The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on cleverness   

"The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on complexity
3 fans of this quote   

"I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on conflict
4 fans of this quote   

"It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition."

Frye, Northrop on thoughts and thinking   

"Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting."

Hoffer, Eric on escapism
3 fans of this quote   

"Sensual pleasures are like soap bubbles, sparkling, effervescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world."

Aughey, John H. on sensuality
4 fans of this quote   

"Sticks and stones may break your bones when there's anger to impart. Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart. Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp's nest."

Unknown, Source on anger
7 fans of this quote   

"The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society."

Cooley, Charles Horton on imagination   

"The way we imagine ourselves to appear to another person is an essential element in our conception of ourselves. In other words, I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am."

Bierstedt, Robert on imagination
4 fans of this quote   

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in."

Carson, Rachel on imagination
3 fans of this quote   

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts."

Baudelaire, Charles on romance and romanticism   

"The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule."

Brookner, Anita on romance and romanticism
4 fans of this quote   

"When a load of bricks, dumped on a corner lot, can arrange themselves into a house; when a handful of springs and screws and wheels, emptied on a desk, can gather themselves into a watch, then and not until then will it seem sensible, to some of us at least, to believe that all these thousands or millions of worlds could have been created, balanced and set to revolving in their separate orbits -- all without any directing intelligence at all."

Barton, Bruce on universe
5 fans of this quote   

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

Eliot, T. S. on death
3 fans of this quote   

"Our emotions are only incidents in the effort to keep day and night together."

Eliot, T. S. on emotions
6 fans of this quote   

"All cases are unique and very similar to others."

Eliot, T. S. on originality
3 fans of this quote   

"What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them."

Eliot, T. S. on people
4 fans of this quote   

"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn."

Addison, Joseph on books - reading
12 fans of this quote   

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other."

Everett, Douglas on ability
69 fans of this quote   

"The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do."

Marden, Orison Swett on ability
13 fans of this quote   

"Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch's soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated."

Sade, Marquis De on hope
3 fans of this quote   

"Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust."

Sade, Marquis De on lust
6 fans of this quote   

"Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes."

Sade, Marquis De on lust
6 fans of this quote   

"Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted."

Sade, Marquis De on punishment   

"I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure."

Sade, Marquis De on torture
4 fans of this quote   

"There is in every woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity."

Irving, Washington on adversity
8 fans of this quote   

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing."

Nin, Anais on love
27 fans of this quote   

"What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, or uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully."

Cherbuliez, Victor on luck
5 fans of this quote   

"Men... are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations."

Robertson, Frederick W. on expectation
3 fans of this quote   

"It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now."

Ginsberg, Allen on art
8 fans of this quote   

"The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present."

Machiavelli, Niccolo on promises
4 fans of this quote   

"A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was."

Hall, Joseph on reputation
4 fans of this quote   

"Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted."

Burns, Robert on art
5 fans of this quote   

"The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman treads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet."

Yeats, William Butler on time   

"It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace."

Shaw, George Bernard on art
8 fans of this quote   

"I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens."

Woolf, Virginia on innocence
3 fans of this quote   

"Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before."

Unknown, Source on writers and writing   

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."

Orwell, George on perfection
5 fans of this quote