Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
No social stability without individual stability.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
It is 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.'
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.
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.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
No social stability without individual stability.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
It is 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.'
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.
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.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
Every man's memory is his private literature.
