I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
Experience is not what happens to you it is what you do with what happens to you.
My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to desce...
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
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.'
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often...
With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time...
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder...