The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
The business of being happy requires making a conscious choice. People think being happy will just happen to them someday, if only they do this or that right. But it doesn't - you have to choose it. You choose happiness, you don't wait for it to choose you.
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness - the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.
I believe the choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself.
There is lust and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.
It took teams of LEP warlocks to slow down time for a few hours; the magic required to open a door to the tunnel was stupendous. It would be easier to shoot down the moon. Opal tapped this into her notepad. Reminder. Shoot down the moon? Viable?
We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.