Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defined. And then, I ate my own wickedness.
If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, “Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys.
And to think,” Will Farnaby commented, “to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.
We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions.
Choiceless awareness – at every moment and in all the circumstances of life – is the only effective meditation.
From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?
In the course of history it has often happened that one or other of the imperfect religions has been taken too seriously and regarded as good and true in itself, instead of as a means to the ultimate end of all religion. The effects of such mistakes are often disastrous.
Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.
You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.
Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as genuine change for the better.
It tasted like one of those herbal concoctions that health-food enthusiasts substitute for tea.
For the moment the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.
Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things.
He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.
But truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As.
In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in ther interests of the Party or the State.