quotes from classic

Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels.

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A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow,...

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So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a ...

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You never know yourself till you know more than your body.

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Love is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our love to others, and others love to us.

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The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.

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To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.

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It is of the nobility of man's soul that he is insatiable: for he hath a benefactor so prone to give, that he delighteth in us for asking. Do not your inclinations tell you that the WORLD is yours? Do you not covet all? Do you not long to have it; to enjoy it; to overcome it? To what end do men gather riches, but to multiply more? Do they not like Pyrrhus the King of Epire, add house to house and lands to lands, that they may get it all?

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It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

more quotes from Katherine Anne Porter

I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

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You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

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They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

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Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

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Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

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I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

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Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

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Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

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The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

more quotes from Calvin Trillin

That's the remarkable thing about life. No matter how bad it gets it can always get worse.

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Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.

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