“Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.”
“A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop.”
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
“The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
“One of the great attractions of patriotism—it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we’re profoundly virtuous.”
“The proper study of mankind is books.”
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
“Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
“The more you know, the more you see.”
“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
“People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.”
“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
“Beauty is worse than wine; it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.”
“All men are gods, and all gods are men.”
“Chastity—the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.”
“Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another.”
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life.”
“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”
“Most people believe in beliefs rather than facts.”
“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.”
“Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
“What the cinema does better than any other art is to capture time.”
“Love casts out fear, but conversely fear casts out love.”
“There is only one thing that we know about human nature, and that is that it changes.”
“We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.”
“What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?”
“Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to, his organs.”
“It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’”
“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.”
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.”
“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become a craving for power.”
“We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”
“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
“Dream in a pragmatic way.”
“When people are divided, the only solution is agreement, and to agree, people must listen.”
“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful.”
“An artist’s work is often the object of contempt. One has to accept that.”
“The soul has its own currency.”
“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us.”
“The business of a seer is to see.”
“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”
“If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.”