Life and Existence

FIRE . God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

‘God is or he is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? … Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate the two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.

Excuse my dust.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

Let us sleep now.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings … these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself.

A God-intoxicated man. of Spinoza

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that Fate and character are the same conception.

Rattle his bones over the stones;

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously

God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Cor ad cor loquitur.

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,

We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.