if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for...

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who...

No social stability without individual stability.

Choiceless awareness – at every moment and in all the circumstances of life – is the only effective meditation.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear;...

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s...

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with “I,” “me,” “mine,” that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only...

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If...

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time....

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for...

In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don’t exist. I am just a Vox...

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Home, home – a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease...

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire...

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes ’till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the...

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Pain was a fascinating horror

Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight...

The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like...

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man’s distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.

La educación moral, que no debe nunca ser racional en modo alguno.

Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social...

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.

are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity

Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he...

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I...

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant,...

The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in livingcreatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were inrepose, their minds untroubled,...

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

And no wonder; for the new technique of “subliminal projection,” as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable...

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object...

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

The man who wishes to know the “that” which is “thou” may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a...

Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. […] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to...

And the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to...

Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say ‘no’ to the boss. But a man cannot say ‘no’ to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss’s favour...