Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.
The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
I'm always going to look and refer to things and remember things differently than perhaps a real or honest viewer can. I'm tainted with knowing too much. But I still very much love it.
One little known secret to making precisely the right move, at precisely the right time in your life is knowing that in all cases, there is more than one right move and more than one right time. Lots and lots more.
Save the Children is often told that its aims are impossible - that there has always been child suffering and there always will be. We know. It's impossible only if we make it so. It's impossible only if we refuse to attempt it.
By three things the wise person may be known. What three? He sees a shortcoming as it is. When he sees it, he tries to correct it. And when another acknowledges a shortcoming, the wise one forgives it as he should.
The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.