“I may be going nowhere, but what a ride.”
“ If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.”
“There s no need to curse God if you re an ugly duckling. He chooses those strong enough to endure it so that they can guide others who ve felt the same.”
“Following all the rules leaves a completed checklist. Following your heart achieves a completed you.”
“A confident woman wears a smile and has this air of comfortability and pleasantness about her.”
“The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.”
“Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.”
“Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.”
“And if I m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes. A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I ve tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it s a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.”
“To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.”
“We make our purpose.”
“They who reach down into the depths of life where, in the stillness, the voice of God is heard, have the stabilizing power which carries them poised and serene through the hurricane of difficulties.”
“Our privileges are not for our pleasure but rather for our purpose.”
“...But we also believe that part of our mission in life is to find our bliss and follow it. Life is a precious and delicate gift. How much of that gift do we squander out of fear?”
“We must all work in harmony with each other to stand up for what is right, to speak up for what is fair, and to always voice any corrections so that the ignorant become informed and justice is never ignored. Every time a person allows an act of ignorance to happen, they delay our progress for true change. Every person, molecule and thing matters. We become responsible for the actions of others the instant we become conscious of what they are doing wrong and fail to remind them of what is right.”
“Why miss out on what God has in store for you while you’re trying to get in on his plan for somebody else? Your plans are the best—for YOU—and so is your personality. You’re so worth it”
“Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.”