The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness – to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.
Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using – you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?
Dream in a pragmatic way.
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson – paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.
The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
Not quite. I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it – only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power.
Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma: Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny; Love’s as good as soma.
Las palabras, como los rayos X, atraviesan cualquier cosa, si uno las emplea bien.
History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.
Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.
O brave new world that has such people in it.
The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.
Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended – there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense.
That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.
The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short.
If you’re always scared of dying,” Obispo had said, “you’ll surely die. Fear’s a poison; and not such a slow poison either.
Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks – already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.