To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey.
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.
Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
If there’s only one nation in the sky, shouldn’t all passports be valid for it?
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.
Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them — and then they leap.
Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?
I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.
I couldn’t get Him out of my head. Still can’t. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.
To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.
He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas.
We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion.
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity- its envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
Books, like people, can’t be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
I knew very little about the religion. [Christianity] It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools.
Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.
To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.
Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in the trade.
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?Doesn’t that make life a story?
I thought I knew not only her habits but also her limits. This display of ferocity, of savage courage, made me realize that I was wrong. All my life I had known only a part of her.
If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. But what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.
I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent.
We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more–there is no greater relationship.
When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don’t feel the pain of others because they haven’t imaginatively got under their skins.
Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn’t stay dry.
For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.
My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can get.
The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.
It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspiciousof swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountainclimbers.
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious
There are animals we haven’t stopped by. Don’t think they’re harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
Stories–individual stories, family stories, national stories–are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?
A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.
My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all.
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion – it should be our next stop.
The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.
It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day.
As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity–it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in a strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
There are many ways in which life’s little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all.
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
Under the pathologist’s microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist’s job is to find the bull among the matador cells
Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.
So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?
A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.
How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally – certainly with my secular background – the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.