Can you say something about nothing?
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.
Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.
Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.
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.