I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.
One of the great attractions of patriotism.
Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.
When truth is nothing but truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.
In life, man proposes, God disposes.
I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.
Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet’s irreplaceable capital.
Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God’s goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.
Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better.