Accepting a man’s hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.
They smile too much, but it’s an ugly kind of smiling: it’s not joy, it’s pleading.
A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.
He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood.
Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility...
International 4-8818 and we are friends. This is an evil thing to say, for it is a transgression, the great Transgression of Preference, to love any among men better than the others, since we must love all men and all men are our friends. So International 4-8818 and we have never spoken of it. But we know. We know, when we look into each other’s eyes. And when we look thus without words, we both know other things also, strange things for which there are no words, and these things frighten us.
From the screen, a huge white face had looked at him, a face with a mouth one wished one could wish to kiss, and eyes that made one wonder – a wonder which was pain – just what it was they were seeing. He felt as if there was something – deep in his brain, behind everything he thought and everything he was – which he did not know, but she knew, and he wished he did, and wondered whether he could ever know it, and should he, if he could, and why he wished.
Life... had been defined as motion; man’s life was purposeful motion; what was the state of a being to whom purpose and motion were denied, a being held in chains but left to breathe and to see all the magnificence of the possibilities he could have reached, left to scream “Why?” and to be shown the muzzle of a gun as sole explanation?
No, you can never ruin an architect by proving that he’s a bad architect. But you can ruin him because he’s an atheist, or because somebody sued him, or because he slept with some woman, or because he pulls wings off bottleflies. You’ll say it doesn’t make sense? Of course it doesn’t. That’s why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless.
She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it.
And if this should lighten the toil of men,” said Similarity 5-0306, “then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.
His glance was like a plea, like the cry for help of a man who could never cry.
An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design.
A free mind and a free economy are corollaries. One can’t exist without the other.
Because they’re a bunch of miserable children who struggle to remain alive, desperately and very badly, while I – I don’t even notice the burden.
No. I am complying with the law – to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you mAy now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself, where no defense is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice.
Worry is a waste of emotional reserves. Very foolish. Unworthy of an enlightened person. Since we are merely the creatures of our chemical metabolism and of the economic factors of our background, there’s not a damn thing we can do about anything whatever.
When a man drowns himself in work, it’s because he’s trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby.
He explained why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why – if one smallest part committed treason to that idea – the thing or the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity.