It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we’ve made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.
Perhaps you’re a slave to your own idea of yourself.
It’s only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene.
She rose slowly. She didn’t want to go. She also rather resented staying.
They continued to mount the winding staircase. A high wind, blowing through the loopholes, went rushing up the shaft, and filled the girl’s skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until he took the hem of her dress and held it down for her. He did it perfectly simply, as he would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always.
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness, putting forth lilies and snakes.
Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization.
Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes.
But Paul liked the girls best. The men seemed common and rather dull. He liked them all, but they were uninteresting.
He also wearied his mother very often. She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.
Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
I have realized that my will, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people’s wills are even worse.
He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone.
Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.
Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau... established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man and so was the moon. To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven.
It is very much easier to shatter prison-bars than to open undiscovered doors to life.
But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly insane beast.
He would be alone, and apart from life, which was all he wanted.
Quite frantically, he longed not to be.