“Evil is simple and empty. Evil has no mysterious depths. We stare into a dark hole and fill it with our fears, but it is only a hole.”

A third, of more extensive learning, ran To Sir George Villiers’ Ghost, and Mrs. Veal; Of sheeted Spectres spoke with shorten’d breath, And thrice he quoted Drelincourt on Death.

I count this thing to be grandly true: That a noble deed is a step toward God.

The Universe knows itself and expands itself through me.

O hour, of all hours, the most blesse’d upon earth, The bless’d hour of our dinners!

It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back

Most people – and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all – are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

A mission could be defined as an image of a desired state that you want to get to. Once fully seen, it will inspire you to act, fuel your imagination and determine your behavior.

Humility is the embroidery of chiefs.

He (God) doesn’t need me, but He desires me.

There is no need to engage in a mental dialogue about the merits and demerits of the fish, emotionally react to the fish, or jump into the water to try to catch the fish. Once the fish is out of sight, it should also be out of mind.

Discipline is like cabbage. We may not care for it ourselves, but feel sure it would be good for somebody else.

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

I want to be the first to bless you on what God has blessed you with – fighting in the heart of the Muslim world that was a battleground for large historic Islamic wars and what is now the place of Islam’s greatest war in the present era.

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.

Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor. Bread! Bread! I do not believe in a God who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven!

Except for our higher order of minds we are like the little moles under the earth carrying out blindly the work of digging, thinking our own dark passage-ways constitute all there is to the world.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

You want my dark side? Have I ever stolen anything? Not so much intentionally. But I don’t think it’s so much stealing as… being a part of the flow of the universe.

Trauma really does confront you with the best and the worst. You see the horrendous things that people do to each other, but you also see resiliency, the power of love, the power of caring.

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.

That cactus went right through my eye. It left my eye flat. They took me to a doctor, and he said, ‘We’ll have to take the eye out.’ …I fought like a tiger. I said, ‘No! Leave the eye alone.