A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
It’s prohibited, you see. But as I make the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity.…
One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
The trouble with fiction...is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.