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.
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.’
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.
Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.