Lord Edward took a scientific interest in the sexual activities of axolotls and chickens, guinea pigs and frogs; but any reference to the corresponding activities of humans made him painfully uncomfortable.
So far as they’re concerned, the physical fronts don’t exist. Except for a mouth and an anus, their patient doesn’t have a body. He isn’t an organism, he wasn’t born with a constitution or a temperament. All he has is the two ends of a digestive tube, a family and a psyche.
Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.
Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.
All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s.
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defined. And then, I ate my own wickedness.
If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, “Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys.
And to think,” Will Farnaby commented, “to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.
We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions.
Choiceless awareness – at every moment and in all the circumstances of life – is the only effective meditation.
From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?
In the course of history it has often happened that one or other of the imperfect religions has been taken too seriously and regarded as good and true in itself, instead of as a means to the ultimate end of all religion. The effects of such mistakes are often disastrous.
Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.
You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.
Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as genuine change for the better.
It tasted like one of those herbal concoctions that health-food enthusiasts substitute for tea.
For the moment the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.