Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is n...ot something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its ...own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of mysogyny to the myth of woman-hate, wo...man-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity--an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defence against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering.... Tho...se who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I the...refore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of the...ir own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for th...is purpose.... In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »