You mustn't ask too much of human endurance, one must be merciful.

After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the 'real life' we want. Give us something better in books.

It's good advice, but I expect it will be hard to follow; good advice is apt to be, I think.

People don't change . . . You just sort of have to take them like they are.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in...

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

For at every stage of your civilizations there are numbers of you who put aside selfishness and dedicate their lives in service to something they see as being greater than themselves. I say you may...

It's like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers they lose them with a vengeance.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.

Young men of my type are prone to be impatient of details, and give their loyalties without regard to evidence.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

Decent folk had to let indecent folk do their thing; that was the paradox of decency.

It's hard to have faith in your fellow man when you're forced to look at some of his handiwork.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:...

You can go to war with the world, but the world will always win

He isn't stupid, but his interests are so narrow I doubt I could slip a sheet of paper in between them

There are some laws that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space.

Legends about predictions are common throughout the Human Family. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak.

how easy human frailties could thrive under the cover of idealism

Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these...

The sympathetic but sentimental man who sings the song of the blessed child also longs to return to nature, innocence, and the beginnings, but has completely forgotten that children are by no means...

Like animals we call to each other, was the thought that came to him as he remembered the hour of love in the afternoon.

That's the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they're nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted.

What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

My big trouble is, I always sort of think whoever I'm necking is a pretty intelligent person. It hasn't got a goddam thing to do with it, but I keep thinking it anyway.

More often than not, it was the hand of the needy and uncertain that extended the olive branch. History had shown the truth of that over and over again.

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

The same as most prayers, the bulk of what you hear is complaints and demands. Help me. Hear me. Lead me. Forgive me.

Petra turned to her. Everybody lies about who they are. Name one person here who isn't doing that and I will drop out right now! Shanti felt that snake of truth coil around her legs, threatening to...