The really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power.
Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of contradictions. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and ‘going to heaven’ is no more liberating than is the descent into horror.
Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive.
As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they’re the broad highway to divinity.
Era un consejo demasiado bueno como para que yo pudiera seguirlo.
But there’s a hard core of sense. If you’re a Tantrik, you don’t renounce the world or deny its value; you don’t try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.
I hope you slept well,” he said. “Yes, isn’t it lovely?” Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods. “But we had such awful thunderstorms last week.” Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most. “They.
One of the causes, by the way, of the apparent lack, at the present time, of great men lies in the poverty of the contemporary male coiffure. Rich in whiskers, beards, and leonine manes, the great Victorians never failed to look the part, nowadays it is impossible to know a great man when you see one.
The genius of life is to take the spirit of childhood into old age.
But its absurd to let yourself get into a state like this. Simply absurd,′ she repeated. ‘And what about? A man – one man.
They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry – like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.
Once, when I was grumbling over being obliged to eat meat and do no penance, I heard it said that sometimes there was more of self-love than desire of penance in such sorrow. St. Teresa.
Crass,” Dr Robert agreed, “but crass precisely because you’re such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism – that’s what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely – materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism, it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.
But the nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upo them, tend to acquire a taste for more. “Lead us not into temptation,” we pray – and with good reason; for when human beings are tempted too enticingly or too long, they generally yield.
She would have laughed if she haven’t been at the point of crying.
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.
But how practical, how eminently realistic!” said Mr. Scogan. “In this farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they’re past working or breeding or begetting, slaughter them.” “Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty,” said Anne.
But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.
62,400 repetitions make one truth.
The word ‘escape’ was suggestive.