Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.
The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects.
Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you.
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
There were the years-- years of childhood and innocence-- when I had believed that carminative meant-- well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life-- a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.
Los intelectuales de Occidente son todos aficionados a la silla. Por eso la mayoría de ustedes son tan repulsivamente malsanos.
Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.
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.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.
The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful -- because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.
These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.
People are much too solemn about things -- I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.
We were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.
I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.
Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains -- the few that there were -- stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.
His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.
The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
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.
And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs.
To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.
Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Longer Version:
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
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.
Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson -- paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.
The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.
I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.
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.
If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Medical Science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
There was something called liberalism ... Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
Men find a new universe of thought and feeling, clearer and more comprehensible than the universe of daily experience.
No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.
But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
And that, put in the Director sententiously, that is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion... 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.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.
Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.
Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre -- preferably to Iceland. Good morning.
I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, 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.
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