After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.
The political merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this purpose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set.
Other people can’t make you see with their eyes. At the best they can only encourage you to use your own.
The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals – this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter.
The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much.
Man’s highly developed color sense is a biological luxury – inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal.
We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.
I’d rather be myself... Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.
Meaningless pseudoknowledge has at all times been one of the principal motivators of individual and collective action. And that is one of the reasons why the course of human history has been so tragic and at the same time so strangely grotesque.
Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.
That’s the spirit I like,” said the Director.
The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself – and you live in a homemade hell. You become detached – and you live in peace. ‘I show you sorrow,’ the Buddha had said, ’and I show you the ending of sorrow.
Nature at the middle distance is familiar – so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we really know what it is all about. See very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension.
The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and results come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity.
Like chickens drinking, the students lifted their eyes towards the distant ceiling.
In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself. St. Bernard.
To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same. Eckhart.
There is,” wrote William Penn, “something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come.
If you want nature to treat you well, you must treat nature well. If you start destroying nature, nature will destroy you, and this basic moral precept is fundamental in our present knowledge of ecology and conservation. What we know now about ecology points to the fact that nature exists in the most delicate balance, and that anything which tends to upset the balance will produce consequences of the most unexpected character and often of the most disastrous character.
Propaganda may be defined as opposed to rational argument; argument based upon facts. Argument based on facts aims at producing an intellectual conviction; propaganda aims, above all, at producing reflex action. It is aimed at bypassing the rational choice based upon knowledge of facts and getting directly at the solar plexus, so to speak, and affecting the subconscious.