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.

Dünyayı değiştirmek istedim, anladım ki kesin olarak değiştirebileceğiniz tek şey bizzat kendinizdir.

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the...

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.

[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

It must be something voluntary, something self induced – like getting drunk, or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea...

Words are man’s first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;

Henry’s universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it...

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some...

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.

It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole...

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable...

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become...

La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir...

With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time...

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian’s...

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

But if one doesn’t really exist, one wonders why…” she hesitated.”Why one makes such a fuss about things,” Anthony suggested. “All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self...

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example…

Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.