✧Cara✧

People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life.

Notoriety wasn’t as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something.

Like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies.

"Many phenomena – wars, plagues, sudden audits – have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man"

But maybe you ’ve loved somebody, too, and you know? If you have, I don’t need to explain; if you have n’t, I can’t explain.

I hate the moonlight because it ’s beautiful and he is n’t here to see it with me.

It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.

The most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people’s places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding.

I am beginning, in fact, to feel at home in the world—as though I really belonged in it and had not just crept in on sufferance.

It is n’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires spirit .