Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.
Press on! for in the grave there is no work and no device. Press on! while yet you may.
We walk in dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for the One. We die for the One. -- the Ranger oath
For the less even as for the greater there is some deed that he may accomplish but once only; and in that deed his heart shall rest.
May all sentient beings be happy and free of suffering.
The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable.
. . . anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong, we shall soon find out and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.
All extremes are bad. All that is good and useful, if carried to extremes, may become-and beyond a certain limit is bound to become-bad and injurious.
By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.
Bitter though it may be to many, Cadfael concluded, there is no substitute for truth, in this or any case.
Alas, their love may be call'd appetite. No motion of the liver, but the palate
The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.
The friendship I have conceived will not be impaired by absence; but it may be no unpleasing circumstance to brighten the chain by a renewal of the covenant.
May we always be possessed by the consciousness that we are not our own.
Utopians. . . consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind's totalization may flounder.
There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.
What innocence, may I ask, is being played here when it is known that this virtuous damsel has already got a dozen illegitimate children?
As humans, we do get to choose what we eat, and when we choose to eat a plant, we are eating (i. e. , harming) just that plant, plus indirectly whatever nutrients that plant consumed over its lifetime (and we are also harming whatever beings may have been living on that plant or who were injured or killed in the harvesting process). But when we eat an animal, we are eating not just that animal, but also indirectly all of the plants and other beings that that animal ate over its lifetime - those plants became the flesh that we eat.
Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.
This is impossible to predict. War may break out unexpectedly.
