Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real...There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is.

I hear the Wind Woman running with soft, soft footsteps over the hill. I shall always think of the wind as a personality. She is a shrew when she blows from the north -- a lonely seeker when she blows from the east -- a laughing girl when she comes from the west -- and tonight from the south a little grey fairy.

Every word appears in our mind as a composite of everything else we associate with it. We by default personify every word, because in each of our minds, when we think of a certain person, there is one word that is the biggest part of that composite image. If I said swimming, singing or story telling each word is personified by someone different in each of our minds. It is very important to not let hate, treachery or any negative thing be personified by anyone in our mind, also not to give any reason that we would personify them in someone else’s mind. Any space in our hearts we allow hate to occupy, is space that could be filled with love. There will come a time in every person’s life, when they realize they are woefully wanting in the love they have cultivated in their heart. How amazing to think of the contrary: that you personified love in someone’s mind. What better compliment could we ever hear, than for someone to say, that we are their personification of love? I think it’s something that is not too often said, but oh that it was, and more, that there were more reason to say it. My wish is that every person could wake up in the morning with a prayer, that they may have the courage, diligence and desire to love more truly, sincerely and objectively; that every night we reflect on what we may have represented by our thoughts, words and deeds,” Jefferson concluded.

Love conquers all. Let Love then smile at our defeat.

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.

Village life gently swirled around them, with the perpetual ebb and flow of people, scurrying in every direction. The village was a living, organic entity, with blood flowing through its veins, and with a definite pulse and heartbeat. It had its own distinct personality and its own dark caustic humour, and was constantly processing and regurgitating information through its winding, meandering streets.

I wish I had been born a storm. No heart, no tears, just a terrible gale'd been good.

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove 'my friend' before offering to sell him a watch.

(...) pick up your axe, start at the rootsdon't miss the trunk, never forget:to end life truly and finallystart at the roots or end there.

The thirty-plus years of marriage between the ceiling and the cement plaster showed signs of weakness by frequently developing cracks and holes.