43 quotes
English writer and philosopher (1894–1963)
“It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
"For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody."
on Communication
"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."
on Technology
"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."
on Perception
"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."
on Writing
"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable."
on Power
"Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead."
on Nature
"Experience is not what happens to you it is what you do with what happens to you."
on Life
"Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him."
on Wisdom
"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves."
"Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation."
on Emotion
"Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep –"
on Time
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born."
on Culture
"A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it."
on Psychology
"If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible."
on Democracy
"A hell, from which one can be saved by a quibble that would carry no weight with a police magistrate, cannot be taken very seriously."
on Justice
"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."
on Philosophy
"That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do."
on Happiness
"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."
on Humor
"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery."
"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
on Art
