"What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?"

"For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and ofother selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of thecategories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant."

"The rich never have a chance of being neighborly to their equals. The best they can do is feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind."

"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 to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me."

"Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power...."

"The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen."

"If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible."

"Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything."

"The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not."

"My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing."

"It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged."

"The proper study of mankind is books."

"It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill laughter."

"With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar's long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment. The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf. "What a pleasure it is," said Denis, "to do somebody a kindness. I believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or trouble..."

"God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness."

"Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive, even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy."

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

"That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire."

"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray."

"Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted."

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."

"Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held."

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm."

"All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.""Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence."I claim them all," said the Savage at last."

"The consistent thinker ... is either a walking mummy or else if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality a fanatical monomaniac."

"For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height."

"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."

"I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. 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."

"The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency."

"Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning."

"This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act."

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

"It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous."

"These, he said gravely, "are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant."

"Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner."

"Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget."

"Only the most ingeniously optimistic, the most wilfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty - guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power - will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the facts of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and consequently subservience to, the state and its representatives."

"A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it."

"Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived."

"Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells."

"Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors."

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."

"Consciousness is only possible through change, change is only possible through movement."

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."

"Dream in a pragmatic way."

"What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."

"That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent."

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."

"Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody."