Philo Quotes

“What God is to the world parents are to their children.”

“I have an innate fear of fame. I've never thought being famous looked like such a good place to be. I love being incognito.”

“Learning is by nature curiosity... prying into everything, reluctant to leave anything, material or immaterial, unexplained.”

“The Wise are Superb Observers of Nature and Rise Superior to the Blows of Fortune”

“The Limit of Happiness Is the Presence of GodBut it is something great that Abraham asks, namely that God shall not pass by nor remove to a distance and leave his soul desolate and empty (Gen. 18:3). For the limit of happiness is the presence of God, which completely fills the whole soul with his whole incorporeal and eternal light.”

“If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.”

“She took a deep breath. "Let me begin again." If this girl wanted to play ball in front of her department head, Christine would bring it. She closed her eyes and accessed the most expensive Philo Department vocabulary words she possessed."Well, as human beings, when we immanentize the eschaton…”

“In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean.”

“What have you done to your hair?” Mom’s broken voice said, pinning me back to this tiny hospitalroom.“Holy shit!” Icka patted her head as if searching. “You think the nurse stole it? She looked shady.”

“I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when I was little I wondered about that place, how it could be so beautiful and so lost. Sometimes it seemed that the land around my New England home was like that flooded country, with mud where the streets of gold should be and mayflies swarming where there should be lovely fishes, but here and there a shard of crystal to call the heart to beauty. --"Wetlands," in Phoebe.”