God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.