top of page
"Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Philosophy quotes

"Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ['Waiting for the pieces to fall into place']"

"And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men."

"Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?"

"It seems quite pointless to waste health relentlessly in order to earn money that we shall spend on recovering health."

"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."

"The mind-is not the heart.I may yet live, as I know others live,To wish in vain to let go with the mind-Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells meThat I need learn to let go with the heart."

"Fire and IceSome say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice."

"TO BE is life's dilemma while facing the eternity of death."

"We must not learn to try harder. The key is to learn how not to try in the first place."

"Everything else is nothing."
Explore more quotes by Anthony Burgess

"Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace."

"Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?"

"A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey."

"Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."

"Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self."

"Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-."

"It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"
bottom of page