“If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter”
Blaise Pascal
and/or T.S. Eliot
and/or Marcus T. Cicero
and/or Voltaire
and/or Ben Franklin
and/or Robert Sayre
and/or Mark Twain
depending on whom you believe
(just search for the quote and see all the different attributions)
“He who can see both sides of an argument is missing something.”
Idries Shah
“There are worse crimes than burning books, one is not reading them.”
Joseph Brodskey
“The individual who won’t read has nothing over the individual who cannot read.”
Mark Twain
“For a writer there is surely not much that can be more rewarding than the fact of being really read and understood and appreciated. After all, the great thing in life is to share the best one has, no matter how poor it may be. The sharing gives it value. Often when I reread things I have written I find them so bad that I am irritated with myself: of course this is only vanity. But once I realize that they have meant something to someone they acquire something of the other person’s value and meaning. What you read and liked of mine I shall like better now because you have all enjoyed them: I will like them because of all of you. I will like them because they are more yours than mine.”
Thomas Merton
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”
“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.”
C.G. Jung
“To be whole we must deny nothing.”
Stephen Levine
“[R]eligious ‘truths’ are therefore always paradoxical. If religion tries to avoid paradox it merely weakens itself.”
C.G. Jung
“I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery. Scientism smuggles in two untenable points. Namely, that science is, if not the only reliable, then the most reliable [way of knowing]. And second, that the stuff that science deals with, matter, is the most fundamental stuff of the universe. Those are not scientific statements. There is nothing in the way of science to prove they’re true. And truth to tell, they are both wrong. So I am not against genuine science. I think scientism may come close to doing us in, but I think we’re in the nick of time discovering the mistake. Our culture will be opening out to allow the religious worldview to enter.”
Huston Smith
Read the full interview with beliefnet
“For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.”
“I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.”
Lisa Alther [my take]
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
John Maynard Keynes
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Mark Twain
“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
George Carlin
