All virtues come down to courage, at the sharp end of the sword. But courage must be tempered by prudence. Courage wasted by misdirection is the most heart-breaking of all tragedies. If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues run out into dry sands. Yet...where does prudence end and cowardice begin? That's a very good damn question!
|
The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
|
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
|
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain
|
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
|
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
|
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
|
Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
|
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
|
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.
|
All true wealth is biological.
|
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
|
A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
|
A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.
|
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.
|
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
|
It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.
|
You have to be careful who you let define your good.
|
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.
|
Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.
|
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.
|
If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.
|
The dead cannot cry out for justice it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
|
How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old
|
How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?
|
If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.
|
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.
|
An honor is not diminished for being shared.
|
A good friend of my son's is a son to me.
|
Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.
|