When being diagnosed with cancer, it is easy to feel anger or self-pity, but I have never allowed myself to dwell on these negatives.
01:36 min
CLEAR ALL
'Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?
If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.
1
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
3
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. . . . It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’
4