To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.
Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.
Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I – or rather the blessed Not-I – cared to look at.
God: a gaseous vertebrate.
Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
I’m sick. I’ve eaten civilisation and I’m sick.
I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.
A man can smile and smile and be a villain.
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
Industrial man – a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.
For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.