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Top Walter M Miller Jr Quotes

Browse top 51 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Walter M Miller Jr.

Favorite Walter M Miller Jr Quotes

1. "I'm not so sure he's mad, Father. Just a little devious in his sanity." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
2. "Listen, my dear Cors, why don't you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn't allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
3. "....Nature imposes nothing on you that Nature doesn't prepare you to bear." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
4. "Ask for an omen, then stone it when it comes -- de essentia hominum." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
5. "Soon the sun will set'- is that prophecy? No, it's merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
6. "Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think- as long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
7. "It is said that water is for cattle and farmers, that milk is for children and blood for men." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
8. "Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
9. "Bless me Father, I ate a lizard." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
10. "....to abuse the intellect for reasons of pride, vanity, or escape from responsibility, is the fruit of that same tree." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
11. "... for no change comes calmly over the world..." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
12. "Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it's not decades away; it's right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
13. "Francis began the actual illumination of the lambskin. The intricacies of scrollwork and the excruciating delicacy of the gold-inlay work would, because of the brevity of his spare-project time, make it a labor of many years; but in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, finally Extreme Unction, and a moment of blackness at the end-or at the beginning, rather. For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. And then the King would say: "Come," or the King would say: "Go," and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed. It would be hard to believe differently during such an age as Francis knew." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
14. "...in divinity opposites are always reconciled." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
15. "The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
16. "You heard him say it? 'Pain's the only evil I know about.' You heard that?"The monk nodded solemnly."And that society is the only thing that determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?""Yes.""Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. 'The serpent deceived me, and I did eat." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
17. "I mean Jesus never asked a man to do a damn thing that Jesus didn't do." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
18. "When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
19. "Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
20. "To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
21. "That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
22. "Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
23. "Sincere--that was the hell of it. From a distance, one's adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one's own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
24. "Probing the womb of the future is bad for the child." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
25. "Are you an atheist?""Oh no, I honor all the gods.""And how many belong to that all?""Countless. And one.""How meaningless!""'Oliness, let me hear you count to one.""One.""Point at that one."Brownpony stirred restlessly. Finally he tapped his index finger against his temple.Wooshin laughed quietly. "Wrong. You had to think about it too long. And you didn't count to one. You counted from one and stopped. The one is countless." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
26. "If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
27. "The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
28. "He soon decided that almost any fact could be accepted calmly after it had already happened. Men would be just as calm after their cities had been reduced to rubble. The human capacity for calmness was almost unlimited, ex post facto, because the routine of daily living had to go on, despite the big business of governments whose leaders invoked the Deity in the cause of slaughter." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
29. "Could a man decide, 'I am right, and everyone else is wrong?'No evidence of a malfunction, he thought. I am not a coward. Neither am I insane.His heart cried, 'I am disgusted with this purposeless war. I shall quit fighting it." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
30. "Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was 'the last', the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His "I" was the converse of the imperial "We." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
31. "As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
32. "But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
33. "Fire, loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too in Hell. While it burned adoringly in the core of the Temple, it had also scorched the life from a city, this night, and spewed its venom over the land. How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of Man to make a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
34. "There were spaceships again in that century, an dthe ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species that considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speechmakers." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
35. "The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
36. "Like any wise ruler, Abbot Arkos did not issue orders vainly, when to disobey was possible and to enforce was not possible. It was better to look the other way than to command ineffectually." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
37. "Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise and it would not obey." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
38. "Simpletons! Yes, yes! I'm a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We'll build a town and we'll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they'll be dead! Simpletons! Let's go! This ought to show 'em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!" ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
39. "He could think only of the girl and the child. He was certain she had been ready to change her mind, had needed only the command, I, a priest of God, adjure thee, and the grace to hear it--if only they had not forced him to stop where she could witness "God's priest" summarily overruled by "Caesar's traffic cop." Never to him had Christ's Kingship seemed more distant" ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
40. "Dom Paulo had not expected to convince him. But it was with a heavy heart that the abbot noticed the plodding patience with which the thon heard him through; it was the patience of a man listening to an argument which he had long ago refuted to his own satisfaction." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
41. "And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one's face in the desert sun. There was the sense of the imminent, the remorseless, the mindless; it coiled like a heat-maddened rattler, ready to strike at rolling tumbleweed." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
42. "What I impose, I must accept." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
43. "The monk's ultimate goal is direct union with the Godhead. But to aim at that goal is to miss it altogether. His task is to rid himself of ego so that consciousness, once its usual discordant mental content is dumped out of it through ritual prayer and meditation, may experience nonself as a living formlessness and emptiness into which God may come, if it please Him to come." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
44. "When there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
45. "Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
46. "Nayrol is without speech and therefore never lies…" (Nayrol is) one of the nature gods of the Red River people. Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
47. "The Memorabilia, the abbey's small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and soidisant crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey's books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knightsfriars would have burned many of them as "heretical" according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
48. "The captain looked defensive. "You regard our customs as primitive?"Every society to its own tastes, captain. The wisdom of one society would be folly for another. Who is qualified to judge? Only the universe, which passes the judgment of survival on all peoples." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
49. "Tell me, how would you feel if everyone screamed and ran when they saw you coming, or hunted you down like a criminal? How long would you sanity last?"..."...Tell me something else, if all the world was blind save one man, wouldn't the world be inclined to call that man's sight a hallucination? And the man with eyes might even come to agree with the world." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
50. "But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity." ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.
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Io posso continuare a vivere questa mia vita... perché ho una dote che nessuno ha... così in me esasperata, così in me eccellente. Questa dote è la mia grande falsità."
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