The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.
To know how much there is to know is the beginning of learning to live.
There is no life that does not contribute to history.
Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity and resistance to self-pity.
If the Best is yet to come, the Present will blend with it Beautifully.
Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes-they throw off like sparks. But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.
Precedents are dangerous things; let the rein of government then be braced and held with a steady hand.
The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous-and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It's exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout.
This is what we see when we look up at Rainier, the beauty, the horror, the awe the unbelievability of size that confirms our own consequence on this earth. We look at the mountain, like god and can imagine nothing larger. Its incompressible life-span reminds us of the fleeting mortality of our own bones. It looms over our lives on clear days and and stay present but hidden through the clouds of winter. Like god it remains everywhere forever.
Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.