The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.
Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!
Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.
All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
A cocktail party is a place where you talk with a person you do not know about a subject you have no interest in.
No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.
It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.
Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India.
To me personally the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.
Art is both creation and recreation.
Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man’s liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted.
China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
He who is afraid to use an “I” in his writing will never make a good writer.
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.