It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
If folks can learn to be racist, then they can learn to be antiracist. If being sexist ain't genetic, then, dad gum, people can learn about gender equality.
I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something God recognizes I will do - and I have done it - and God forgives me for it.
Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.