There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.

Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

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

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

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

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.

When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

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

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.

The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

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

Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.

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

People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

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

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

Share This Page