Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when I was about twelve.
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The public scandal is what constitutes the offence: sins sinned in secret are no sins at all.
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Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.
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Really to sin you have to be serious about it.
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We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment good in itself, is not good to do religiously.
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It’s harder to confess the sin that no one believes in / Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. / For the crime is in relation to the law / And the sin is in relation to the sinner.
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Between these two, the denying of sins, which we have done, and the bragging of sins, which we have not done, what a space, what a compass is there, for millions of millions of sins!
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In best understandings, sin began, / Angels sinned first, then Devils, and then Man.
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! 1 say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
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The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
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Simplicity is the mean between ostentation and rusticity.
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And all the loveliest things there be / Come simply, so, it seems to me.
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Teach us Delight in simple things, / And Mirth that has no bitter springs.
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It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
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To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet.
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In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
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The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men’s talk than against the expectation of female silence.
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An absolute silence leads to sadness: it is the image of death.
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Many a time the thing left silent makes for happiness.
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By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together, that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are henceforth to rule.
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Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don’t speak.
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Silence is sorrow’s best food.
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Your highest female grace is silence.
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The stillest tongue can be the truest friend.
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The words the happy say / Are paltry melody / But those the silent feel / Are beautiful—.
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Silence is all we dread. / There's Ransom in a Voice— / But Silence is Infinity.
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Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
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The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.
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When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When
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Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.
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I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.
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The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
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The sleep of a sick man has keen eyes. / It is a sleep unsleeping.
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When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.
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The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.
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Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
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A cough is something that you yourself can’t help, but everybody else does on purpose just to torment you.
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How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family’s eye?
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A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
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There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunderstroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.
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All diseases run into one, old age.
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Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.
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Can there be worse sickness, than to know / that we are never well, nor can be so?
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A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it’s more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn’t trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or to get the laundry done.
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A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.
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The man that blushes is not quite a brute.
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If wisdom were offered me with the proviso that I should keep it shut up and refrain from declaring it, I should refuse. There s no delight in owning anything unshared.
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