| 1 |
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. After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. 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. |
| 2 |
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad. Maybe this world is another planet's hell. 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. |
| 3 |
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. |
| 4 |
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. |
| 5 |
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. |
| 6 |
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. |
| 7 |
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. I am I, and I wish I weren't. The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. I like being myself. Myself and nasty. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. |
| 8 |
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. |
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