It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person – because as soon as we look in one another’s faces we can see the other point of view.
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.
The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol – brighter than my students at university.
Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can’t get out of.
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it’s a desire to be possessed.
When we pull back and get, for a moment, the ‘bird’s eye’ view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm’s eye view.
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.
Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.
Criminals interest me, because they’re driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.
If I’d stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you’re being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that “the world” would decline to recognize them.
Phenomenology is not a philosophy ; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.
I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne’s Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.
Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.
The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.
The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.
Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.
If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to ‘slow down’ when you look at a tree or a puddle?