If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.
Home, home – a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.
Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things and people for granted and thereby missing out on the pleasure of being grateful that things aren’t worse and of praising and thereby lifting the spirits of others.
The flower of the present rosily blossomed.
Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.
How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one’s voice!
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.
God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment.