Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment. Walker Percy
Some Similar Quotes
  1. This above all: to thine own self be true. - William Shakespeare

  2. What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me. - Helen Keller

  3. One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error. - Hermann Hesse

  4. Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft. The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather. Gutman: That may be true. But what can you do about it? Byron: Make a departure. Gutman: From yourself? Byron: From my... - Tennessee Williams

  5. Most people spend their whole lives waging war–against people they don't even know. And against themselves, whom they know least of all." from BETWEEN TWO DESERTS - Germaine Shames

More Quotes By Walker Percy
  1. You can get all A's and still flunk life.

  2. The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His...

  3. If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour...

  4. Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.

  5. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as...

Related Topics