The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?” “You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me...

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.

All right then,” said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.””Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to...

the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering...

We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can’t leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can’t allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like...

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.

It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it’s healthy that people...

…reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays….

It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest...

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political...

A felicidade nunca é graciosa.Happiness is never gracious.

As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they’re the broad highway to divinity

Viata e insa atat de banala,incat literatura trebuie sa se ocupe de lucrurile care ies din comun.

Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep –

make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not...

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and...

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always...

Një prej funksioneve më kryesore të një miku është (në një formë të butë e simbolike) të durojë ndëshkimet të cilat do të donim, por nuk kemi mundësi, t’ua japim armiqve tanë.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the...

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I’ve no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you’re a bore.

The world’ is man’s experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature...

With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar’s long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him...

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to...

He was digging in his garden–digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death–and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays...

All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.

Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.

What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or...

Shut lips, sleeping faces,Every stopped machine,The dumb and littered placesWhere crowds have been:.All silences rejoice,Weep (loudly or low),Speak-but with the voiceOf whom, I do not know.

That’s what you men are always doing; it’s so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on,...

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making fly-traps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is...

We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions.

The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is...

But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies...

Eating, drinking, dying – three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don’t live it and, if...

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are...

He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knewit, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent deliriumof his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming...

It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. “Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got...

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers — a full-blown Belle of...

And it’s what you never will write,” said the Controller. “Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn’t possibly be like...

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out...

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.

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