He could not se a possible, general good above Selver's imperative need. You can't save a people by selling your friend.
Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
It is not easy for a person to grow up. The process takes a long time. Many years, maybe many lifetimes.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
