May Quotes - Page 285

No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want - and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.

People must not attempt to impose their own 'truth' on others. The right to profess the truth must always be upheld, but not in a way that involves contempt for those who may think differently. Truth imposes itself solely by the force of its own truth.

A great challenge: stop ruining the garden which God has entrusted to us so that all may enjoy it.

You may be poor yourselves in material ways, but you have an abundance of gifts to offer when you offer Christ and the community of his Church.

Empire may be gained by gold, not gold by empire. It used, indeed, to be a proverb that "It is not Philip, but Philip's gold that takes the cities of Greece.

That we may consult concerning others, and not others concerning us.

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.

As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.

The universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist.

Freedom means you're free to do just whatever pleases you; if, of course that is to say, what you please is what you may.

I may be plucky, but I am not stupid.

Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free.

We may be joined these days more by the questions we have in common than by the answers we share.

Knowledge cannot be changed, but the use to which it may be put can very easily be changed.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

Stop thinking about the audience and what they may be thinking of your music. Just play the music.

The many-headed multitude, whom inconstancy only doth by accident guide to well-doing! Who can set confidence there, where company takes away shame, and each may lay the fault upon his fellow?

You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

Football makes nonsense of class. It may make nonsense of colour in some circumstances.

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.

An Icelandic mayor goes on an anti-elf rant which gets him in trouble.