We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Trade embodies the principle of liberty. Trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism; it makes peace, keeps peace, and will destroy slavery. It destroyed the old aristocracy and created a new one but this one is based on merit instead of entitlement and is continually falling like the waves of the sea.

highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved... I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

I never saw any lamp shining more brilliantly than the lamp of silence.

For thirty years I sought God. But when I looked carefully I found that in reality God was the seeker and I the sought.

Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.

I desire not to desire, for my will is without value, since I am ignorant in any case.

This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.

Desire is like the child of a barren woman.

To free your mind from desire, visualize your body as the heavens and your thoughts as stars in the sky.

What is the nature of sky? How can you desire it, how can you think about it at all?

the complete integrity of Hesse’s self-absorption is what guarantees the permanence of his work. As long as people struggle with the need to be themselves, and the difficulty of doing so, he will be a living presence—which is even better, perhaps, than being a great writer

Old age did not put an end to Goethe’s career as a lover: in 1821, when he was seventy-two, the widowed Goethe fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl he met at a spa resort, and even proposed marriage. (She sensibly declined.)... At the age of eighty-two, dying of a painful heart condition, Goethe’s last words were 'More light!'... it is Goethe’s last perfect metaphor: one final plea for illumination, from a writer who had spent all his life seeking it.

it might seem that the important part of the Jewish story had ended with the Bible, leaving only a long sequel of passive suffering... the Jews had possessed none of the things that made for the usual history of a nation: territory, sovereignty, power, armies, kings. Instead, the noteworthy events in Jewish history were expulsions... Perhaps this constant evolution of the meaning of Jewish history is, in fact, its truest meaning.... full understanding is only possible when a historical phenomenon is concluded, when it has become part of the past. But Jewish history, after three thousand years and against all the odds, is still very much a work in progress.

The flood of Wells’s prose lifted him from the respectable poverty in which he was raised to wealth and international fame... The problem he set himself was how to combine that mission, his furious devotion to human progress, with a cool certainty that the end of all progress would be entropy, devolution, nullity. The way he lived this paradox, even more than his books, is what makes Wells, still, an exemplary modern man.

The image of James taking a bow to the jeers and catcalls of the audience has become one of the primal scenes of modernism, and James is revered as “the Master” partly because of his willingness to wager everything—popularity, fortune, happiness, life—on his vision of artistic perfection

In all his writing, he ranged himself on the side of freedom—political, social, personal. But the surest sign of his genius was the paradoxical way in which he imagined a metaphysical freedom... for Tagore, it was life that meant confinement in subjectivity, while death was liberation into the free play of being.

The captain of a low-life odyssey, Bukowski accomplished something rare: he produced a large, completely distinctive, widely beloved body of work... Even at his most unheroic, he is the hero of his stories and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert approval. That is why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with little experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire.