“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

You can still die when the sun is shining.

And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

In the particular is contained the universal.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.

The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).

The fear of punishment, the desire of reward, the sense of duty, are all useful arguments, in their way, to persuade people to holiness. But they are all weak and powerless, until a person loves Christ.

Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.