Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.

Because in the end, we die. It’s like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: ‘in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here.

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for...

Until the human condition could be resolved it was not safe to acknowledge the different roles men and women played in the journey to enlightenment. Over time it was found that the best way to...

Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some...

The definition of a good story is one that remains with you long after you’ve turned that last page.

The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous...

Feeding the family trumps conviction every time, Mary though, a basic law of the human condition.

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine’s Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to...

We are gods with anuses.

Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers — Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world...

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

…unquestioning automatonsblindly marching to the beat -an eerie crunching soundhoards of shuffling feet…(from silent moments)

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby...

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon...

One thing that is clearer to me every day is how much we all have in common, and one of those commonalities is that we all think we are alone.

Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help them steal away, but the...

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust...

Humanity is lost because people have abandoned using their conscience as their compass.

but that is how the guilty speak

If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed,...

If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was...

We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

People have been bred to hate for generations — eons, maybe. Some fundamental urge. Something implicit in the human condition.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a...

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your...

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines...

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

To hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd.

That’s a compliment for anyone who knows the freedom and clarity of losing their mind,” he reaffirmed her.

I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain’t a heck of a way to be in...

She starts to cry. ‘It’s just so terrible,’ she says.’Which part?,’ I ask.’Being human.

Human spirit needs music. Music nourish the soul to survive life’s trauma.

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find

Living the good life as created beings depends on living within the limits and according to the truths of the human condition. Purity of heart and the capacity to channel desires toward personal self-mastery in...

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of...

…children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody....

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in...

My mind didn’t clear. It had been clear before. Instead it muddled, suddenly ablaze with rioting factions of insecurities and dreams, a cacophonous battleground of conflicting moral codes and dogma. I was, therefore, back to...

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.