"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 the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced."

"Every change is a menace to stability."

"Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder."

"Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs."

"A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."

"It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination."

"The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different."

"Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas-that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!"

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."

"That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep."

"One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them."

"Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the people, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey."

"Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence - either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous 'embarkation' and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage."

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."

"But then the course of events takes no account of verisimilitude. Fiction has to be probable, fact does not."

"Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength."

"People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence cases to have any point of meaning."

"Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols."

"The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it."

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

"Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting."

"Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it."

"There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done."

"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."

"A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt."

"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."

"Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche."

"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision."

"Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance."

"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.'"

"Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work."

"Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time."

"Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt."

"... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy."

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery."

"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."

"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."