The Errant Pilgrim's Progress

“Christ expressed all His teachings in His last commandment: 'Love each other, as I loved you. Everyone will see that you are my disciples, if you love each other.' He did not say, 'If you believe,' but 'If you love.' Faith can change with tie, because our knowledge is constantly changing. Love, on the contrary, never changes; love is eternal.

My religion is to love all living beings.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul

“To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.”
― Kondiaronk

“The first two books I have mentioned are great indeed. But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering in the economy of art–as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays