Earl Hamner Jr. Quotes

War and love - they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them, you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

In the end, my story, in Iraq and afterward, is about more than just killing people or even fighting for my country. It's about being a man. And it's about love as well as hate.

Being a mom has made me a better person. It's made me more compassionate. It's just awesome. I think I was put here to be a mom.

I understand now that the vulnerability I've always felt is the greatest strength a person can have. You can't experience life without feeling life. What I've learned is that being vulnerable to somebody you love is not a weakness, it's a strength.

I learned about life before I went into the theater, which is why I've been so happy. I was a soldier.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

Courage is managing fear to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And it's a great demonstration of love. It's really what love is. It's finding areas in which other people are more important than you.

In whatever guise - our own daily nightmares of war, intolerance, inhumanity or the struggles of an Assistant Pig-Keeper against the Lord of Death - the problems are agonizingly familiar. And an openness to compassion, love, and mercy is as essential to us here and now as it is to any inhabitant of an imaginary kingdom.

It takes a lot of work to be a great mother, a great daughter, and a great friend. All those things take effort, and I think, after having my daughter, she opened up this fearlessness within me, and I'm setting an example for her.

I think the history of the world suggests if one studies the Romans, and one studies the early Greeks, and one studies the history of the world, they all eventually falter if they don't come back to the basic aspect of integrity and honor and feelings of love one for another.

He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers

It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.

Honor modesty more than your life.

I'd always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn't the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinction between what hinders and what helps itself.

The way of the warrior is based on humanity, love and sincerity

There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.

There is no royal road or ready way to virtue.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.