That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
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.