Truer Quotes

I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves. ~ Vera Brittain

His hands as he worked were deft and sure, but so gentle
he was being careful not to hurt me any more than he had to. I sat very still, hardly daring to move.
I was in love with him.
The knowledge swept through me, truer than anything I'd ever known. Oh, my God, I was in love with him. ~ L.A. Weatherly

If you find something to tell, tell it to your truest, though that make little to tell; the truer you speak, the more you will know to tell. ~ Laura Riding

Maidens hearts are always soft:Would that men's were truer! ~ William C. Bryant

I perfectly agree with you, sir,' was then his remark. 'You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line. ~ Jane Austen

I have seen purer liqors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier women courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited. ~ Hinton Rowan Helper

Jemma, I know that we have known each other for only a few short weeks, but I feel as if I have known you all my life. This courtship may have been arranged at the beginning, but my love for you is truer than ever. So, I ask you, my love, as a man would rightly ask the woman he wishes to be his wife, if you will marry me. Don't say yes because of the original arrangement, say yes because you want to. I will love you forever Jemma Girard, and I would never force you to stay in an arrangement you did not want. If you wish it, we can eliminate the plans of marriage. I stood there in a breathless shock, staring at this wonderful and handsome young man who loved me enough to let me go. ~ Katlyn Charlesworth

Anyway," Jake says. I turn back to him. "I just wanted to start over a good note, that's all."
I have to put this poor guy out of his misery. "Look, Jake, I'm not in the market for –" I almost say a boyfriend, which is true, but this is even truer: "People". ~ Courtney Summers

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love. ~ Edna O'Brien

The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes, we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life, we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us. ~ Alexander Pope

Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core. ~ Irving Penn

After all, they were just words, and she had learned long ago that a man's actions displayed his truer nature more than the things he said. ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Strength is not merely proved by how much blood one has spilt, how many foes defeated, or how many battles won. Sometimes, living day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and minute-to-minute is a truer sign of one's mettle. The ticking of the clock and the passage of time wear away courage more surely than any mortal blade might do - ~ Greg James

You look too pretty to be useful."
"Truer words were never spoken. ~ Richelle Mead

What did you write on the back of the postcard?"
"It was going to be a surprise."
"I'm too old for surprises. Besides, surprises always come with a sharp edge that is meant to hurt. I don't want to be hurt - not by you. Tell me."
"Just two words."
"Let me guess: If not later, when?"
"Two words, I said. Besides, that would be cruel."
I thought for a while.
"I give up."
"Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I've never said anything truer in my life to anyone. ~ Andre Aciman

Are we not, all of us, in some way, damaged mirrors? Are we not constantly engaged in focusing the light of thought - memories out of the depths of human experience - onto the photographic plate of each moment? The image captured in this instant is a snapshot of all eternity, subtly altered by our own brokenness. And who's to say that the image formed by a damaged mirror is not a truer picture of the universe? ~ Yael Shahar

When it is peace, then we may view again With new-won eyes each other's truer form And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain When it is peace. But until peace, the storm The darkness and the thunder and the rain. ~ Charles Sorley

For there clings to him something that often overwhelms us
memory, a recollection that whatever we're striving for now
was once closer and truer, and that its union with us was incredibly tender.
Here, everything is distance;
There, is was breath. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. ~ David Foster Wallace

The theater of the absurd represented a contrast to realistic theater. Its aim was to show the lack of meaning in life in order to get the audience to disagree. The idea was not to cultivate the meaningless. On the contrary. But by showing and exposing the absurd in ordinary everyday situations, the onlookers are forced to seek a truer and more essential life for themselves. ~ Jostein Gaarder

London Fashion Week is so different from any of the others. Compared to the strictness in New York, London seems freer from commercial constraints. Truer to the process, to street style, to a sense of humour. ~ Alexa Chung

Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons. ~ William James

Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation ... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained ... ~ Andrew Dickson White

Christianity, in its true form, tells us that there is an Author and that he is good, the essence of all that is good and beautiful and true, for he is the source of all these things. It tells us that he has set our hearts' longings within us, for he has made us to live in an Epic. It warns that the truth is always in danger of being twisted and corrupted and stolen from us because there is a Villain in the Story who hates our hearts and wants to destroy us. It calls us up into a Story that is truer and deeper than any other, and assures us that there we will find the meaning of our lives. ~ John Eldredge

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface. ~ Ron Rash

We all craft a story we can live with. The one that makes ourselves easier to live with. This is not the one worth writing. To write your story, you must face a truer version of it. You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you. That do not spare you the trouble of knowing what made you, and what into. I used to wonder if my own difficulty in doing this made me a hypocrite. Now, I'm not sure I believe in hypocrites. We often prescribe for others the thing we most need. It is part of how we learn. ~ Melissa Febos

I thinke it not amisse to forewarne you that you thrust as few wordes of many sillables into your verse as may be: and hereunto I might alledge many reasons: first the most auncient English wordes are of one sillable, so that the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne. ~ George Gascoigne

He wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be. ~ Ben Fountain

The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth. All true Masons know that they only are heathen who, having great ideals, do not live up to them. They know that all religions are but one story told in divers ways for peoples whose ideals differ but whose great purpose is in harmony with Masonic ideals. North, east, south and west stretch the diversities of human thought, and while the ideals of man apparently differ, when all is said and the crystallization of form with its false concepts is swept away, one basic truth remains: all existing things are Temple Builders, laboring for a single end. No true Mason can be narrow, for his Lodge is the divine expression of all broadness. There is no place for little minds in a great work. ~ Manly P. Hall

True that life is given,
And received. But truer still:
The single-act of giving
Makes the offerer the beggar, too - ~ Edith L. Tiempo

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led of Cruso's island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day. ~ J.M. Coetzee

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools ... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing. ~ Paul Cezanne

No story is truer than any other story that has the truth in its heart ~ Emily Henry

Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The result of this conversation was a sudden determination to produce a work which, if it had no other merit, might present truer pictures of the ocean and ships than any that are to be found in the Pirate. ~ James Fenimore Cooper

Prayer of Peace
I offer this prayer of peace
Not to the Christian God
Nor to the Buddhist God
Nor to the Islamic God
Nor to the Jewish God
But to the God of all humanity.
For the peace that we wish for
Is Not a Christian peace
Nor a Buddhist peace
Nor an Islamic peace
Nor a Jewish peace
But a human peace
For all of us.
I offer this prayer of peace
To the God that lives within all of us
That fills us with happiness and joy
To make us whole
And help us understand life
As an expression of love for all human beings.
For no religion can be better
Than any other religion
For no truth can be truer
Than any other truth
For no nation can be bigger
Than the earth itself.
Help us all go beyond
Our small limits
And realize that we are one
That we are all from the earth.
That we are all earth people
Before we are Indians, Koreans, or Americans.

God made the earth
We humans have to make it prosper
By realizing that we are of the earth
And not of any nation, race, or religion,
By knowing that we are truly one
In our spiritual heritage.
Let us now apologize
To all humanity
For the hurt that religions have caused,
So that we can heal the hurt
Let us now promise to one another
To go beyond egotism and competition
To come together as one in God.
I offer this prayer of ~ Ilchi Lee

I don't understand what's wrong with being whoever I want to be, especially when it feels truer sometimes than who people think I actually am. ~ Danila Botha

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones. ~ Paul Klee

Do transports of rage make a religion any truer? A man shot in a battle does not lose his temper, but argue with a theologian and he becomes implacable. ~ Voltaire

The fewer moving parts, the better." "Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering. ~ Christian Cantrell

Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth. ~ Jean Anouilh

But as they stared into "The Star Spangled Banner," the music was blessedly drowned out by the squeal and moan of the barking train, iron on iron, a truer anthem of America. ~ Victoria Wilcox

There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner. ~ Charles Dickens

The keen Saracen blade sliced through the archbishop's shield down to his arm, but Turpin's aim was truer. Corsablis's turbaned head rolled in the dust as the prelate swung his mighty weapon. The Berber's steed raced on, bearing a headless rider who soon toppled from his mount. Turpin, galloping on to where the press was thickest, turned in his saddle and addressed the head where it lay: 'Scoundrel pagan, you've met your end! So be it always with the enemies of Christ! ~ Mario Andrew Pei

Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they're better friends, truer friends. And we're better and truer to them. ~ Steven Pressfield

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. ~ Tim O'Brien

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals. ~ Mark Twain

The cliche was always that 'everybody's a critic,' but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover - somewhere in the thickets of the Internet - reactions to shows from people who've seen them in previews. ~ Ben Brantley

You are you that is truer than true ~ Dr. Seuss

You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can't do much, anyway), but in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of selfrevelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind - for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive - even that degree of selfrevelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Writing that springs from the surface of existence - when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up - is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. This is why there is never enough time at one's disposal, for the roads are long and it is easy to go astray, there are even times when one becomes afraid and has the desire - even without any constraint or enticement - to run back (a desire always severely punished later on), how much more so if one were suddenly to receive a kiss from the most beloved lips! I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my roo ~ Franz Kafka

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head. ~ Hannah Arendt

It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition. ~ Thomas Hardy

No man can do me a truer kindness in this world than to pray for me. ~ Charles Spurgeon

If I hadn't decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: "Tony Webster - He Never Got It." But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about "He's on His Own Now"? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I'll stick with: "Every Day Is Sunday. ~ Julian Barnes

This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and traditional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,
if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,
if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,
if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men
I will have none of it. ~ Anna Julia Cooper

Mastering the art of resilience does much more than restore you to who you once thought you were. Rather, you emerge from the experience transformed into a truer expression of who you were really meant to be. ~ Carol Orsborn

I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are available in America. ~ Hinton Helper

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows. ~ Annie Besant

The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact. ~ David Malouf

It was truer to my father to let the songs he'd sung die with him, little by little, averse at a time. How could these art-mongers constantly ignore the mortality of beauty, a pleonasm if ever I'd heard one? ~ Dimitri Verhulst

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all. ~ Theodor Adorno

As his mind becomes purer and his emotions come under control, his thoughts become clearer and his instincts truer. As he learns to live more and more in harmony with his higher Self, his body's natural intuition becomes active of itself. The result is that false desires and unnatural instincts which have been imposed upon it by others or by himself will become weaker and weaker and fall away entirely in time. This may happen without any attempt to undergo an elaborate system of self-discipline on his part: yet it will affect his way of living, his diet, his habits. False cravings like the craving for smoking tobacco will vanish of their own accord; false appetites like the appetite for alcoholic liquor or flesh food will likewise vanish; but the more deep-seated the desire, the longer it will take to uproot it
except in the case of some who will hear and answer a heroic call for an abrupt change. ~ Paul Brunton

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell ... ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Gansey thought of how strange it was to know these two young men so well and yet to not know them at all. Both so much more difficult and so much better than when he'd first met them. Was that what life did to them all? Chiselled them into harder, truer versions of themselves? ~ Maggie Stiefvater

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all. ~ Nicholson Baker

There can be no truer faith than the one you might have in yourself. ~ Ray Torres

Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. What! Than ten hours over your books on your knees? ~ B. B. Warfield

He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it. ~ Jim Harrison

At times your unconsciousness is truer than your conscious mind ~ Jenny Holzer

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face. ~ Selima Hill

I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted. ~ Ford Madox Ford

For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. ~ Virginia Woolf

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. ~ C.S. Lewis

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking. ~ Carl Jung

You give too much attention to things that make you unhappy,' Allison says. No doubt she is right. And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy
it's such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren't these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decorum, isn't most everyone judgmental and disappointed? Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them
can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in? ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

The Moodies is a responsibility to deliver the goods every night onstage and to do it sincerely; otherwise, it doesn't work. You've got the three guys left in the Moodies that really want to do it onstage, so I think we're truer to the old records now than we ever were. ~ Justin Hayward

[The writer] must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him. ~ Charles R. Jackson

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,
Than that the largest heart is soonest broken. ~ Walter Savage Landor

As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer. ~ Anthony Bourdain

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer ... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying
trying as hard as you can
which is a good thing. ~ Robin McKinley

The most grievous wrong of that day ... was to be found in the establishment of the celibacy of the clergy ... This hideous doctrine of a celibate priesthood was maintained only by a constant struggle against the better and truer instincts of the heart. ~ Lillie Devereux Blake

There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would. ~ Anne Tyler

We might put it this way: every group already has, in one sense, a rule of life - its values and ways of doing things. The challenge is to identify and to authenticate what they are. A group can become a truer expression of community when it is able to express its own tacit rule. ~ The Society Of Saint John The Evangelist

We were formed and made on purpose, for a purpose. The most important thing we could accomplish here on earth, then, is to give ourselves completely to telling the world with our whole life that God is truer, greater, and more satisfying than our wildest imagination - than the most successful career, the biggest platform, or the happiest marriage. ~ Marshall Segal

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. ~ Tim O'Brien

Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains. ~ C.S. Lewis

Of course change is hard. It has to be. It carries with it - every single time - the potential to elevate, even revolutionize your life in ways you can never truly realize until you're already transformed, safely on the other side of your resistance and fear.

Change is hard, but rarely as difficult as not doing anything.

Now is the time - really, right now - to start making those changes you know you need to make in your life. Dive into change, into the sea of possibility it creates, and trust that all the hard work will bring you some deeply wonderful things - like a greater sense of calm and happiness, and a truer taste of freedom.

If you can't dive in, that's okay. Tip toe, baby step, crawl if you have to. Just keep moving forward, no matter what, into what is already becoming your new and beautiful reality. ~ Scott Stabile

Science can have a purifying effect on religion, freeing it from beliefs of a pre-scientific age and helping us to a truer conception of God. At the same time, I am far from believing that science will ever give us the answers to all our questions. ~ Nevill Francis Mott

The memory of their first ride was with her when she led him out into the darkness, for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance in a man's life must be done beneath the open sky. She told herself that there were powers stronger than hatred, and spells older and truer than any the maegi had learned in Asshai. The night was black and moonless, but overhead a million stars burned bright. She took that for an omen. ~ George R R Martin

How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were - no, not a truer, for the other is false, but - a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch. ~ George MacDonald

(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them
the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind
should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

[I]n general, my work is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about re-investing it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography had from the beginning of its existence. ~ Thomas Struth

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I'm talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity. ~ Anatole Broyard