The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.
Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas .
We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.
In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.
We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.
The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.
It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.
Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.
Take man’s most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.
A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
A man’s soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation.
It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.
Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.