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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

Walker Percy

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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Destined
Defeated
Goodness
World

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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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.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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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 at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
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You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
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The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Walker Percy