“The dreamer sometimes falls into the doldrums, but is said to emerge from them again. And the absent-minded person also makes up for it with bouts of perspicacity. Sometimes he is a person whose right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you, or more usually, you may absent-mindedly allow it to slip from your mind. Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.”

Source: The Lovely Bones

"The Symbols"
The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)
Context: p>The sign work of the Orient it runneth up and down;
The Talmud stalks from right to left, a rabbi in a gown;The Roman rolls from left to right from Maytime unto May;
But the gods shake up their symbols in an absent-minded way.Their language runs to circles like the language of the eyes,
Emphasised by strange dilations with little panting sighs.</p

Source: Baby Proof

Source: Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995), Ch. 4 : Spring Giddiness, p. 46

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour (1957), p. 245
Context: It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.

Quoted in "Paul Newman's Road To Glory," http://www.filmmonthly.com/Profiles/Articles/PNewman/PNewman.html interview with Paul Fischer, Film Monthly (2002-07-01)

Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir

Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855), The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race (1854)
Context: No science has been reached, no thought generated, no truth discovered, which has not from all time existed potentially in every human mind. The belief in the progress of the race does not, therefore, spring from the supposed possibility of his acquiring new faculties, or coming into the possession of a new nature.
Still less does truth vary. They speak falsely who say that truth is the daughter of time; it is the child of eternity, and as old as the Divine mind. The perception of it takes place in the order of time; truth itself knows nothing of the succession of ages. Neither does morality need to perfect itself; it is what it always has been, and always will be. Its distinctions are older than the sea or the dry land, than the earth or the sun. The relation of good to evil is from the beginning, and is unalterable.