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...
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?
Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.
The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.
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 hi...
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and more rarely sustained contemplation.
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...
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.
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...
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.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time having a purpose tending in a certain direction.