Good manners have much to do with emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Feast of Mary, Martha & Lazarus, Companions of Our Lord [Paul] makes use of the symbolism of baptism, which in the East was performed by the complete immersion of the believer in water. "We were buried with Christ through our baptism (and so entered) into a state of death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the splendor of the Father, we too might walk in the newness which belongs to (real) life." To the rite as such Paul did not attach overwhelming importance. "Christ", he says, "did not send me to baptize, but to preach the Gospel." Paul recognized in the idea a most suggestive figure for the change wrought by faith in Christ. He found it necessary to guard against the crude sacramentalism which found in the mere physical process, as such, the actual impartation of new life, quite apart from anything taking place in the realm of inward experience. The Israelites in the wilderness ... received baptism in the Red Sea and in the cloud which overshadowed them; and yet they were disobedient, "the majority of them God did not choose," and they perished miserably. The inference is plain. No sacramental act achieves anything unless it is an outward symbol of what really happens inwardly in experience. The test of that is the reality of the new life as exhibited in its ethical consequences. "How can we who are dead to sin live any longer in sin?" If baptism is a real dying and rising again, then it is indeed a profound revolution in the personal life, a revolution which is simply bound to show itself in a new moral character.

I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.

The ideal social state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution to the general stock.

Man thinks, God directs.

Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.

The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it--a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fire-place; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Oh, that was a good time, when I was unhappy. - credited to Sophie Arnould,

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

Treat others as thou wouldn't be treated. What thou likest not for thyself, dispense not to others.

Friends will keep you sane, Love could fill your heart, A lover can warm your bed, But lonely is the soul without a mate.

Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.

Those who want much, are always much in need; happy the man to whom God gives with a sparing hand what is sufficient for his wants.

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

Just try explaining the value of statistical summaries to the widow of the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of four feet.

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.