The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
Time is not a road - it is a room.
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
I am infinitely strange to myself.
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.
Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.
And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.' 'I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.' He turned. 'You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy.'
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
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