The Infinite Library

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

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

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

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“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.”

“Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.”

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

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

“To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction.”

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

“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.”

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”

“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.”

“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.”

“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

“Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.”

“The complement of works, imagining and emotions is faith - not faith in the sense of belief in a set of theological and historical affirmations, nor the sense of a passionate conviction of being save by someone else's merits, but faith as confidence in the order of things, faith as a resolutely acted upon in the expectation that what began as an assumption will come to be transformed, sooner or later, into an actual experience, by participation, of a reality which, for the insulated self, is unknowable.”

“You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”

“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.”

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

“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.”

“Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”

“God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.”

“There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

“What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.”

“It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.”

“There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

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

“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

“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.”

“Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”

“Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.”

“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”

“One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

“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.”

“Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.”

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

“The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.”

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”

“This state of 'no-mind' exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit.”