That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
The silent bear no witness against themselves.
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.
The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.
All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.
Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.
Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest?
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.'
I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
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