Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.
You can't do something forever.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
All the money you made will never buy back your soul.
He did ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich.
The dirt of gossip blows into my face and the dust rumors cover me. But if the arrow is straight and the point is slick, it can pierce through dust no matter how thick.
You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we're all spirit. That's all we are, we're just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we're going to leave that behind.
Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants. . . have often been stay-at-home naturalists. . . concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area.
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.
One of my missions is to get people to go, "Oh, she's really nice and I really like her, but what were the words she just said?!" I want your instincts to be at odds with your mind.
The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism. . . for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.