It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think of inquiring what’s underneath.
That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.
If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.
You can’t be a good economist unless you’re also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician.
Those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed.
But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women – I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that’s delightful. Otherwise I can’t enjoy it with an easy conscience.
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.
Simplicity is no virtue unless you are potentially complicated.
Did you ever feel,” he asked, “as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out?
To change a vocabulary is easy; to change external circumstances or our own ingrained habits is hard and tiresome.
Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.
Everybody should stick to the insanity that God has seen fit to curse him with.
Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority.
We haven’t any use for old things here.” “Even when they’re beautiful?” “Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.” “But the new ones are so stupid and horrible.
Community, Identity, Stability.” Grand words. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.
What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves.
Were there any crimes or tragedies in the family?” “Let me see,” Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I can only think of two suicides, one violent death, four or perhaps five broken hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the whole, it’s a placid and uneventful record.
Glad to hear what?” asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last “I see,” and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.
We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.