Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock.
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.
The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you.
Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.
But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.
I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.
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.
Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment
Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
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.
Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
The lion will lay down with the lamb...but every morning they'll have to provide a new lamb. Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.
It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop)
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.