What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.

Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities-we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.

It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. . . Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.

I care," he said in a trembling voice. "I care so much that I do not know how to tell you without it seeming inconsequential compared to how I feel. Even if I am distant at times and seem as if I do not want to be with you, it is only because this scares me, too.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step but most of the time we are taking small seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

It's impossible to move to live to operate at any level without leaving traces bits seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

I've been working on Barb for a while. I looked at her as a sort of every woman. She's incredibly strong she's incredibly generous. She's seemingly insane because she is in the situation of a polygamous relationship but she had definite reasons to do it.

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time and the drawback if you do not give it your full attention of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Aside from what it teaches you there is simply the indescribable degree of peace that can be achieved on a sailing vessel at sea. I guess a combination of hard work and the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea - the profound solitude - that does it for me.

I was the first in my peer group to get pregnant. All I craved was reassurance. I needed someone to tell me that all the seemingly random symptoms I had - weird things such as excess saliva - were normal. And I was worried because I wasn't getting any morning sickness.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria who were frightened of life who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought system planning intelligence and honest purpose as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed seeming to be dragged rather than to march to the intended goal. Something of this sort must I think always happen in public democratic assemblies.

There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.

When you are older you will understand how precious little things seemingly of no value in themselves can be loved and prized above all price when they convey the love and thoughtfulness of a good heart.

Experience has shown and a true philosophy will always show that a vast perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.