That’s why,” he said speaking with averted face, “I wanted to do something first. I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn’t absolutely un-worthy. I wanted to do something.
Familiarity breeds indifference.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.