I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
The monarchical institution in England is immensely valuable.
One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle aged, and unseemly in the old.
I think Queen Elisabeth II is a charming woman.
The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.
Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.
I’m much too modest a person.
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.
One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
I simply make this point, that the monarchy in so far, as it is identified with what is, in my opinion, an obsolete class structure, is making a mistake, and the task of those who are responsible for the conduct of the monarchical institution is to detach it from that class structure.
I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it’s a drama.
Travel, of course, narrows the mind.
Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.
I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills.
My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.