The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
The more you know, the more you see.
If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.
Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry.
Everyone belongs to everyone else.
If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.
To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.
Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.
Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.
The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.
The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.
One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.
If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.
We can’t allow science to undo its own good work.
When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you’re out of harmony with intention.
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.