If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.
It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.
On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.