Truth

"Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects..."

"Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood."

"IF her life had taught her anything, it was that you never really knew what people had going on beneath the surface. People were shit. The only difference between them and animals was people felt the need to hide it."

"We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There's no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy--there's nothing we can do."

"Too many people out there tell us what we can and cannot do but…they don’t know who we are, what’s put in us."

"The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance."

"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."

"It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom."

"Beware:Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails,Irrational and blind,Or fear looms,Defiant and closed. Blind, closed,Suspicious, afraid,Ignorance Protects itself,And protected,Ignorance grows."

"Nobody can turn you into a slave unless you allow them. Nobody can make you afraid of anything, unless you allow them. Nobody can tell you to do something wrong, unless you allow them. God never created you to be a slave, man did. God never created division or set up any borders between brothers, man did. God never told you hurt or kill another, man did. So why is man your god, and not the Creator?"

"The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power."

"For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth"."

"You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble."

"I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways."

"Emotional states are fairly quick bursts of neuronal gossip. Traits, on the other hand, are more like the neuronal equivalent of committed relationships."

"The human ego is the ugliest part of man. We lift up men who only show us darkness, and put down those brave enough to show us the light. Likewise, people engage in darkness when it is light outside, and acknowledge the light only when it is dark. We abandon those fighting for us to cheer behind those fighting against us. And, we only remember good people and God when it is convenient for us, and take them for granted because their doors are always open - only to chase after closed doors and personalities void of substance and truth."

"There is no compulsion for man to accept the truth. But it is certainly a shame upon the human intellect when man is not even interested in finding out as to what is the truth! Islam teaches that God has given man the faculty of reason and therefore expects man to reason things out objectively and systematically for himself. To reflect and to question and to reflect."

"The ego lusts for satisfaction. It has a prideful ferocious appetite for its version of "truth". It is the most challenging aspect to conquer; the cause for most spiritual turmoil."

"But just because you love something, I added to myself, doesn't mean you'll ever be great. Not if you don't work. Most people stink at the things they love."

"One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth."