Favorite saying

• "'It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its “stars.”' - F. L. Lucas "But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?" - Mark Twain "You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the... appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God." - Graham Greene “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us." - Henry David Thoreau "A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." - Ingrid Bergman "With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property, because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and multilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and slip and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed." - G.K. Chesterton "Truth is simple. It has no clothes, no boundaries to define it. But we cannot grasp the immaculately simple. We cannot perceive truth without clothing. So Truth dresses up for us, in a story, in sage advice, in a blueprint of the cosmos. And then, before we can imagine that we have grasped Truth, it switches clothes. It tells us another story—entirely at odds with the first. It provides us new advice—to go in a different direction. It displays another model of how things are—in which each thing has changed its place. The fool is confused. He says, “Truth has lied!” The wise person sees within and finds a simple, pure light, unfettered by the neurons of the human mind." - the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson "Sexual desire is not a desire for sensations. It is a desire for a person: and I mean a person, not his or her body, conceived as an object in the physical world, but the person conceived as an incarnate subject, in whom the light of self-consciousness shines and who confronts me eye to eye, and I to I. True desire is also a kind of petition: it demands reciprocity, mutuality, and a shared surrender. It is therefore compromising, and also threatening. No pursuit of a mere sensation could be compromising or threatening in this way." - Roger Scruton "I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn "The philosopher can even discover how permanent carnage is provided for and ordained in the grand scheme of things. But will this law stop at man? Undoubtedly not. Yet who will kill him who kills everything else? Man! It is man himself who is charged with slaughtering man. But how can he accomplish this law, he who is a moral and merciful being, who is born to love, who weeps for others as for himself, who finds pleasure in weeping and who even invents fiction to make himself weep, and finally, to whom it has been said that whoever sheds blood unjustly, by man shall his blood be shed?" - Joseph de Maistre"