Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example.
You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right
If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.
We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge
The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.
We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.
It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.
There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.
For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs.
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.
At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?