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.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Walking and talking – that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that...

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage’s arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He...

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence...

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce…As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread,...

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

Cheltuim astăzi cu mult mai mult pentru băutură şi fumat dec t cheltuim pentru edu- caţie. Şi nu e de mirare. Aproape în fiecare dintre noi, aproape tot timpul, există pornirea de a fugi de...

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit...

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

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