Conflict is the soul of literature.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.
Sociopaths differ fairly dramatically in how their brains react to emotional words. An emotional word is love, hate, anger, mom, death, anything that we associate with an emotional reaction. We are wired to process those words more readily than neutral, nonemotional words. We are very emotional creatures. But sociopaths listen as evenly to emotional words as they do to lamp or book - there's no neurological difference.
The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. The overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. Which means that the Bible is not first a recipe for Christian living but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our un-Christian living.
Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]
I knew it was unrealistic to think I could build an institution overnight. But if I took baby steps, eventually it would happen.