#is

In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet. In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools. ↗

— Alan Paton

#silence #strike #life

Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need. ↗

— J.I. Packer

#compassion #conceit #life

One must know a bad performance to know a good one. You can't be middle-of-the-road about it, just as you can't be middle-of-the-road about life. I mean, you can't say about Hitler, I can take him or leave him. Well, I can't be middle-of-the-road about a performance, especially my own. I feel that if I can vomit at seeing a bad performance, I'm ahead of the game. ↗

— Patricia Bosworth

#artistry #high-standards #life

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat. ↗

— Walter Isaacson

#lsd #music #mystical #psychological #steve-jobs

Fools, their wisdom weak, are their own enemies as they go through life, doing evil that bears bitter fruit. ↗

— Juan Mascaró

#life

One of the things that kills Buddhist spiritual life is excessive seriousness. ↗

— Gil Fronsdal

#spirituality #life

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life? ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#life #love #precious-things #life

Quand on parle des vices d’un homme, si on vous dit : “Tout le monde le dit” ne le croyez pas ; si l’on parle de ses vertus en vous disant encore : “Tout le monde le dit”, croyez-le. ↗

— François-René de Chateaubriand

#people #relationships #society #wisdom #life

There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why. ↗

— William Barclay

#day #days #discover #great #life

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly? ↗

— George Eliot

#mediocrity #ministry #life