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Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
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The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.
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People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
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Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
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Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
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Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
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Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
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What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
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It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
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Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
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Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
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Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
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I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
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How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
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Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
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Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
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Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.