Selected quotes from a collection of the Sun magazine’s Sunbeams section

A friend and reader of this blog sent me a whole bunch of Sun magazines a good year or more ago. Today I pulled them out and culled some of the best quotes from about half of them. I will do this again eventually with the other half.

And now the quotes begin:
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sound like a pistol shot. — Czeslaw Milosz

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee of custom, is itself a service. — John Stuart Mill

If an elephant has its foot on a mouse and you say that your are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. — Bishop Desmond Tutu

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In our society, we’ve become myopic and obsessive about one particular kind of love: dyadic love, which takes the form of romance, sex, marriage. As a result we end up asking all the wrong questions. Books about relationships talk about how to “get” the love you need, how to “keep” the love and so on. But the right question to ask is “How do I become a more loving human being?” — Sam Keen

For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it mattered where your are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get there (imprisoned for draft resistance) was right and somehow the longer I was there, the better I felt…..I felt filled with love for everyone: everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t know; for plants, fish, animals; even bankers, generals, prison guards, and lying politicians—everything and everyone. Why did I feel so good? Was it God? Or approaching death? Or just the way life is supposed to be if we weren’t so busy trying to make it something else? — David Dellinger

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God. — Honoré de Balzac

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form. — William R. Inge

It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong…It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything would go around wearing a stupid grin saying, “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening. It is very efficient, and can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels. — Terry Pratchett