Straight Thinking

It is not for nothing that Confucius told his disciples that the three hundred and five songs of the Song-word Scripture could be boiled down to the commandment: "Have no twisty thoughts." You cannot have twisty thoughts if you are real and if you are thinking about real things....
— Archibald MacLiesch, "Why Do We Teach Poetry?"

"Solomon," I used to counsel him when I still assumed — preposterously, as it turned out — that every living being has some potential for salutory intellectual change, "there is really no better thing a man hath to do under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry, for who can tell when the silver cord shall be loosed and the golden bowl be broken and our dust be returned to the earth as it was?"
The prick wrote it down studiously, pausing with the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth before requesting me to please repeat the one about the silver cord. And soon he was noising these words of mine about the city as his own. Solomon writes down on his clay ledger everything I say, as though the ramifications of knowledge were coins to be gained and husbanded avariciously, instead of liberating influences to expand and gladden the psyche.
— Joseph Heller, God Knows, p.87.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.
— George Elliot, The Lifted Veil, used as the fronticepiece of Malcolm Lowry's October Ferry to Gabriola.

In explaining the nature of influx, Swedenborg wrote: "I am obliged by my conscience to manifest these things; for what is the use of knowing, unless what is know to one be also know to others? Without this, what is knowing but collecting and storing up riches in a casket, and only looking at them occasionally and counting them over, without any thought of use from them? Spiritual avarice is nothing else."
— Emanuel Swedenborg, The Intercourse Between the Soul and the Body, paragraph 18, London, 1796.

Samuel Johnson and Boswell, his biographer, were together at a concert in which some violin virtuoso had just sweated through a very difficult piece. Boswell said, "That piece must have been very difficult." Johnson answered, "Difficult? I wish it had been impossible!"

From p. 94 in Raymond Smullyan's This Book Needs No Title:
....we should bear in mind the keen observation of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, that certain kinds of nonsense are important nonsense.

Forgiveness is giving up all hopes for a better past.
— Anonymous

The heathen spirit is wingless. It cannot lift itself to heights from which the totality of being is visible, and it therefore loses itself in details. It lacks fantasy for that which it cannot apprehend with the senses; it must hold the thing in its hand.
— Sholem Asch, What I Believe, 1941, p. 157.