zb > zb's Quotes

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“What can be explained is not poetry.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane”
― Emily Dickinson

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell

“I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.”
― Marvin Heemeyer

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
― W.B. Yeats

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― Yeats, William Butler

“Intellect is not wisdom.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”
― Thomas Sowell

“ When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“A Word is Dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“She had aged more than four years. She had never had very good teeth, and now had lost two, just back of the upper eyeteeth, so that the gaps showed when she smiled. Her skin no longer had the fine taut surface of youth, and her hair, pulled back neatly was dull.

Shevek saw clearly that Takver had lost her young grace, and looked a plain, tired woman near the middle of her life. He saw this more clearly than anyone else could have seen it. He saw everything about Takver in a way that no one else could have seen it, from the standpoint of years of intimacy and years of longing. He saw her as she was.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
― Emily Dickinson

“This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me”
― Emily Dickinson

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Truth is so rare, it is delightful to tell it.”
― Emily Dickinson