Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
Death is the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
If you want to write, keep cats.
The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
I am I, and I wish I weren’t.
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
I know very dimly when I start what’s going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.
Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.
The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with “I,” “me,” “mine,” that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else’s.
For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.
Let us be kinder to one another.