Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.
Wittgenstein has created a void into which neo-Kantianism, existentialism, utilitarianism have made haste to enter.
I can decide what to say but not what the words mean which I have said. I can decide what to do but I am not master of the significance of my act.
Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.
Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world.
When I am told that a person is happy,’ said Nick, ‘I know that he is not. Of really happy people this is never said.
There are false suns, easier to gaze upon and far more comforting than the true one.
When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one.
All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable.
Filthy lucre! Filthy lucre!” I could hear Sammy saying, with the voice of a man cursing the woman he has ruined.
Michael could hear him yawning. At last he said, ‘That cider has made me quite sleepy.’ ‘Well, go to sleep then,’ said Michael. ‘Oh, no,’ said Toby. ‘I’m not as sleepy as all that.’ In a few minutes he was asleep.
This is perhaps the saddest experience in the demise of love and the most difficult for the imagination to encompass: to come to know that someone who loved you once now regards you as boring and annoying and unimportant. Sheer hatred might even be preferred to this.
Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusions, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points.
She stopped thinking so as not to cry.
You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.
How could he assess her like this because of something which had happened in the past? The past was never real for Dora. The notion that Paul might keep her past alive to torment her with, now occurred to her for the first time.
Like all inexperienced people, Toby tended to make all-or-nothing judgements.
And he could not help being a little bit cheered up and consoled as he got into the Bentley and set off alone for Oxford.
Everyone must go his own way, Jake,’ said Hugo. ‘Things don’t matter as much as you think.
You know as well as I do that one can be imprisoned in one’s mind.