The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.
The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex.
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 end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
To be able to choose one’s enemies is an unfailing characteristic of the successful.
If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can, and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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’.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations 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.
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.
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Well, I’d like to oblige you, but mankind is extinct.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Your true traveler 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.
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.
The most distressing aspect of the world into which I was going was its rigidity. Since machinery had continued to develop, mechanism had to be in the ascendancy. I must renounce all idea of improvisation and rediscover the blessedness of obedience.
Liberty means being free to believe what you want to believe – to march to your own drummer, live by your own conscience, and die by your own sword – or it doesn’t mean anything at all.
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
Never give your heart to a dog to tear.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
At least 80% of the world’s population lives on less than $10 a day. That’s a sobering thought for those of us who find it hard to get by on $15,000 a year.
The disease called ‘the world’ is becoming more and more dangerous.
A child who learns to think will eventually take actions that change the world.
Aldous Huxley once wrote, ‘Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.’
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