mjohn

“Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.”
― Miguel de Cervantes

“Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods