Clergyman's

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.
— George Orwell

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck and the house is never burgled and the ship never goes down.
— Jean Anouilh

Think you to be a philosopher while acting as you do? think you to go on thus eating, thus drinking, giving way in like manner to wrath and to displeasure? Nay you must watch, you must labor; overcome certain desires; quit your familiar friends, submit to be despised by your slave, to be held in derision by them that meet you, to take the lower place in all things, in office, in positions of authority, in courts of law. Weight these things fully, and then, if you will, lay to your hand; if as the price of these things you would gain Freedom, Tranquility, and passionless Serenity. .
- Epictetus

Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel

This is what science can do for us, if we let it. If offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.
— Emily Nagoski

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
— Denis Diderot

A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.
— Frank Herbert

I hope to die in the saddle seat.
- Albert Ellis