"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."

"...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays...."

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death."

"There was something called Christianity."

"The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches."

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness."

"Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers."

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."

"The course of every intellectual if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough ends in the obvious from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred."

"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know."

"The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary."

"The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value."

"And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion."

"Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself."

"Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image."

"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable."

"Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason."

"The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room."

"What a gulf between impression and expression! That's our ironic fate-to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse-touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash."

"I'm not denying their kindness, said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue."

"Only times and places, only names and ghosts."

"Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium."

"The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved."

"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."

"As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you're a bore."

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

"An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex."

"Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body."

"Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief."

"Every man's memory is his private literature."

"Experience teaches only the teachable."

"Liberties aren't given, they are taken."

"The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies."

"One can't have something for nothing. 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."

"It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical."

"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."

"Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep."

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."

"Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn."

"No social stability without individual stability."

"But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about things," Anthony suggested. "All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self-just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course," he went on, "once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss-that is, if you're sensible. Like me," he added, smiling."

"That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do."

"Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying."

"Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began."

"He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop."

"My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger."

"Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?"

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."

"I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly."