Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous.
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals.
Imperialism is the underlying motor of racism. The underlying reason that racism keeps on being promoted in all of its various forms.
Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this: always obey such an impulse.
Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by 'groups,' 'collectives,' or 'States,' which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals.
All work is noble; the only ignoble thing is to live without working. There is need to realize the value of work in all its forms whether manual or intellectual, to be called 'mate,' to have sympathetic understanding of all forms of activity.
The prosperity gospel, in its various forms, has always been with us and always will. But that reality is no less problematic for being inescapable.
Always when you go to a new country and they teach you bad words, you just say them without knowing the value and people look at you because you didn't know that value of them.
Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.
Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network.
Whenever I mentor people and help them discover their purpose, I always encourage them to start the process by discovering their strengths, not exploring their shortcomings. Why? Because people's purpose in life is always connected to their giftedness. It always works that way. You are not called to do something that you have no talent for. You will discover your purpose by finding and remaining in your strength zone.
There is no argument so cogent not only in demonstrating, the indestructibility of the soul, but also in showing that it always preserves in its nature traces of all its preceding states with a practical remembrance which can always be aroused. Since it has the consciousness of or knows in itself what each one calls his me. This renders it open to moral qualities, to chastisement and to recompense even after this life, for immortality without remembrance would be of no value.
Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates.
The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.
I grew up in Chicago, and there was always snow. In Los Angeles there never was, so we would always import snow!
I have done it [appointed commissions] regretfully and with the hope that it would be temporary. But after a commission is established you find it always wants to enlarge itself, employ more people, is very busy with Senators and Congressmen to impress upon them the great value of the services of the commission, and even when I talk to people that I appoint to commissions and tell them I would like them to go on to various boards with the idea that they may be abolished, they say they ought to be abolished, but when they have taken their position they very soon seem to change their mind.