A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

The brain is wider than the sky.

Religion is a matter of the heart. No physical inconvenience can warrant abandonment of one’s own religion.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

When you become a Christian, something truly amazing happens: God comes to live inside your heart. You become the home of God.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts but by his intentions. For God alone reads our hearts.

The beauty of a woman must be seen from in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides.

Because the sweeter the cake, the more bitter the jelly can be.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

I shall the effect of this good lesson keeps as watchman to my heart.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It’s a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.