Life and Existence

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

But childhood, prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life— is the source from which self-respect springs.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

It is good to rub and polish our brains against that of others.

The brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good.

The brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good.

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.