Quote collection
679 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable."
"Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness."
"We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes."
"Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny."
"You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear."
"The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above."
"What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder."
"We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom."
"Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it."
"... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled."
"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience."
"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 is everything ours; it is also everybody else's."
"...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution."
"The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same."
"Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms."
"Let us be kinder to one another."
"Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."
"Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay."
"The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him."
"Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words."