The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
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I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
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It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
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The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
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The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
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It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
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One may understand the Cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
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If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
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The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
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All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
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Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
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And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
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Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
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The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
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Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
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A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
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A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
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A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
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Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
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Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
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The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
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Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
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Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
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With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
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Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
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If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
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Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
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