We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.
Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
Sheep with a nasty side.
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.
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