A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy
You may tell me that my hand and foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence. I could believe you, but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the spiritual is not the true and real part of me.
I would like to say that whites jumped right behind Malcolm X. They’re makin’ a book about him, it’s required readin’ in all colleges now, and they’re makin’ a movie about him, and projectin’ him as the leader and if you read his book and see the movie that’s comin’ out, it’ll make you hate Elijah Mohammed and the Muslims. Mainly, this is done to turn the black people against the real leader and I’d like to say that this is the way white people rule.
I get bitter, angry and disbelieving and I tell my kids there a lot of idiots out there. I also want them to know that being successful is not the real world - that their parents get treated better because they're on TV.
But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness.
We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we re to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and keep only the offspring of the best.
Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.
We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
We've spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.
Both ground- rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land are, therefore, perhaps the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.
The wicked can have only accomplices, the voluptuous have companions in debauchery, self-seekers have associates, the politic assemble the factions, the typical idler has connections, princes have courtiers. Only the virtuous have friends.