
“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
Source: Middlemarch
“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
Source: Middlemarch
“Ordinary human love results in misery. Love for God brings blessedness.”
Women Saints of East and West
“A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.”
Je crois qu'il faut presque toujours un coup de folie pour bâtir un destin.
Les yeux ouverts: entretiens avec Matthieu Galey [With Open Eyes: Conversations With Matthieu Galey] (1980)
On Mahatma Gandhi<!-- p. 506 (1949) / p. 310 (1961) -->
Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)
Context: I knew that Gandhiji usually acts on instinct (I prefer to call it that than the "inner voice" or an answer to prayer) and very often that instinct is right. He has repeatedly shown what a wonderful knack he has of sensing the mass mind and of acting at the psychological moment. The reasons which he afterward adduces to justify his action are usually afterthoughts and seldom carry one very far. A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.
“I have always been — I think any student of history almost inevitably is — a cheerful pessimist.”
Quoted in "Jacques Barzun '27: Columbia Avatar" http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/jan06/cover.php by Thomas Vinciguerra, Columbia Today (January 2006)
“I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“I don’t think of all the misery, but the beauty that still remains.”