Clergyman's

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows.
- Socrates

In the morning when we began straggling out in small parties on our way to the trial, several of us went down in the elevator with three entirely correct old gentlemen looking much alike in their sleekness, pinkness, baldness, glossiness of grooming, such stereotypes as no proletarian novelist of the time would have dared to use as the example of a capitalist monster in his novel. We were pale and tightfaced; our eyelids were swollen; no doubt in spite of hot coffee and cold baths, we looked rumpled, unkempt, disreputable, discredited, vaguely guilty, pretty well frayed out by then. The gentlemen regarded us glossily, then turned to each other. As we descended the many floors in silence, one of them said to the others in a cream-cheese voice, ""It is very pleasant to know we may expect things to settle down properly again,"" and the others nodded with wise, smug, complacent faces.
To this day, I can feel again my violent desire just to slap his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some kind of washing bat or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really make an impression — a butter paddle — something he would feel through that smug layer of too-well-fed fat.
- Katherine Anne Porter

Even a single lamp dispels the deepest darkness.
— Mahatma Gandhi

Wittgenstein expressed more than once the fear that his writings would be destroyed by fire. He related with horror how the great historian, Mommsen, had lost a manuscript volume of his History of Rome in that way.
- Norman Malcolm

Whatever goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.
— Idries Shah

The essence of any interpersonal relationship is interaction. Two individuals may be said to have formed a relationship when on repeated occasions they are observed to interact. By interaction it is meant that they emit behavior in each other's presence, they create products for each other, or they communicate with each other. In every case we would identify as an instance of interaction there is at least the possibility that the actions of each person affect the other.
- John Thibaut

Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable. ... The roots of this devotion to violence are deep, and we will be well rewarded if we trace them to their source. When we do, we will discover that the religion of Babylon—one of the world's oldest, continuously surviving religions—is thriving as never before in every sector of contemporary American life, even in our synagogues and churches. It, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America.
- Walter Wink

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
— Mark Rothko