The untutored egotist merely wants what he wants. Give him a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil.
And so they lived unhappily ever after’.
Many seeds had fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild flowers.
You read and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly.
He loved her infinitely, and for that reason was able to love everything in the world as much as he loved her.
The writer proposes, the readers dispose.
Money brings no satisfaction if one has to work for it; for if one works for it one has no time to spend it.
He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.
To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!
There were the years – years of childhood and innocence – when I had believed that carminative meant – well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life – a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste and money-lenders were abolished, you’d collapse.
There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances.
Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection – for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery – then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion.
At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate – which comes to the same thing in practice – we behave as though we were certain of men’s equality.
All my thoughts are second thoughts.
Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else’s ready-made phrase about them.
It is by manipulating “hidden forces” that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares – a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate. And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces – and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with – that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War.
Indifference is a form of sloth. For one can work hard, as I’ve always done, and yet wallow in sloth; be industrious about one’s job, but scandalously lazy about all that isn’t the job. Because, of course, the job is fun. Whereas the non-job – personal relations, in my case – is disagreeable and laborious.
When psychological education is less rudimentary that it is at present, people belonging to different types will recognize each other’s right to exist. Every man will stick to the problems, inward or outward, with which nature has fitted him to deal; and he will restrained, if not by tolerance, at least by the salutary fear of making a fool of himself, from trespassing on the territory of minds belonging to another type.
Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can’t do without your fellow humans, and that, when you’re with them, they make you sick.