Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it.
Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
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.