Quote collection
679 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge."
"Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto."
"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 trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence."
"Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown."
"Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future."
"We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters."
"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."
"The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous."
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters."
"Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given."
"It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous."
"I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly."
"Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation."
"Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are."
"For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society."
"Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress."
"Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science."
"We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look."
"If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were."
"One seventh of your life is spent on Monday."