Ronald > Ronald's Quotes

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
― Meister Eckhart

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
― Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart

“Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
― Meister Eckhart

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“O lost,
And by the wind grieved,
Ghost,
Come back again.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams

“I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”
― Charles Dickens

“A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.”
― Kouta Hirano

“All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Space Between

“All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.”
― Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars

“Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in the
world. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

“Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power.
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposèd kings encamp them still,
In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will.
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

(Inside the little rind of this weak flower, there is both poison and powerful medicine. If you smell it, you feel good all over your body. But if you taste it, you die. There are two opposite elements in everything, in men as well as in herbs—good and evil. When evil is dominant, death soon kills the body like cancer.) ”
― William Shakespeare

“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The devil has not vanished simply because people refuse to believe he exists, no more than God has...”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

“Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 1

“People may be persuaded that the machine is doing good. In fact, good is only capable of being done on a small scale. Evil is more versatile. You can hate those you have never seen, all the vast multitudes of them, but you can only love those you know — and that with difficulty.”
― John Christopher, Sweeney's Island

“We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives. Right now I'm pleased to be in the light.”
― Neal Shusterman, Unwind

“The fact that you are possessed by a demon does not mean you must become evil. Being evil is a choice, just as being good is a choice. If you let the demon take over, it's because you choose to.”
― James Swain, Dark Magic

“You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Christians and the Law-Courts

“Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream