Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.
In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it’s the feeling there’s something basically wrong with human beings.
I’m basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren’t interested in ideas. The English, I’m afraid, are totally brainless.
The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
I’ve always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I’d find it an extremely difficult conflict because I’d be basically disinclined to accept.
The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
The “passion for incredulity” can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is the agent that ensures happiness for millions of ‘Insiders’.
One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of ‘life’ which begin with a description of man’s place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.
One of man’s deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren’t take his eyes off the world around him.
Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god. Many of his problems are an inevitable result of this struggle.
No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort’s principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.
And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape’s desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape’s appetite.
Defeat is always self-chosen.
A tired man is already in the grip of death and insanity... A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.