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

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history

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

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

To give preference to the life of the intellect is to prefer a pattern of existence which, however imperious it may seem, is felt to be optional. The life of the intellect is a life that one can live or not live. It is, potentially, a life in which one can withdraw from the task of living

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities

Human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment

We are not our own masters, but instruments in the hands of the forces that created us.

The usual justification for the socialization of punishment is that a wrong done to one man is a wrong done to all men collectively.

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth

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

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor

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

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail

There is scarcely any passion without struggle

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dog

Chastity—the most unnatural of the sexual perversions

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

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

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

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

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

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

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced

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

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human

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 or be murdered in quarrels not their own

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood

The more efficient a machine becomes, the more energy it consumes.

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee, they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense

Technological instruments are no more than extensions of our own senses and bodies, and our nervous systems

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

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception

The only completely consistent people are the dead