1. “All men are of divine blood, for there is the god in every man.”
2. “All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
3. “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”
4. ”A love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in the very same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from one another.”
5. “An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or _Tristram Shandy_ or Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?”
6. “A perfect man would never act from sense of duty... Duty is only a substitute for love, like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs can do the journey on their own.”
7. "A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you."
8. ”A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”
9. “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.”
10. "Badness is only spoiled goodness."
11. “But you cannot go on "explaining away" forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on "seeing through" things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to "see through" first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To "see through" all things is the same as not to see.”
12. “Critics who treat "adult" as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. / And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. / When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown up.”
13. “Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. / When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”
14. “Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
15. “Eros "ceases to be a devil only when it ceases to be a god."”
16. "Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us..."
17. “Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?”
18. "Friendship is...the sort of love one can imagine between angels."
19. “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
20. "Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem."
21. “Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”
22. “If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.”
23. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
24. "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
25. "If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a ''wandering to find home,'' why should we not look forward to the arrival?"
26. “I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”
27. "I suggest two rules for exegetics. (1) Never take the images literally. (2) When the purport of the images--what they say to our fear, and hope, and will, and affections--seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal, or chemical, or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture--light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child?"
28. “It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.”
29. “I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
30. ”Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”
31. ”Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last, but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called "being in love" usually does not last...”
32. “Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.”
33. ”Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
34. “Love is too young to know what conscience is.”
35. ”Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but love cannot cease to will their removal.”
36. ”Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost.”
37. “Memory, once awakened, will play the tyrant.”
38. "Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature."
39. “Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.”
40. "Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they ''own'' their bodies -- those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!"
41. “My argument against God was that the universe seemed unjust. But how had I got the idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”’
42. “Nature knows nothing of these names. What you call marriage is by law and custom not nature. Nature’s marriage is but the union of the man who persuades with the woman who consents.”
43. “No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.”
44. ”No man who obsesses about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence about how often it has been told before) you will likely become original without ever having noticed."
45. "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
46. "Nothing is yet in its true form."
47. "Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst."
48. "Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
49. “One of the most important and effective uses of language is the emotional. It is also, of course, wholly legitimate. We do not talk only in order to reason or to inform. We have to make love and quarrel, to propitiate and pardon, to rebuke, console, intercede, and arouse. "He that complains," said Johnson, "acts like a man, like a social being." The real objection lies not against the language of emotion as such, but against language which, being in reality emotional, masquerades--whether by plain hypocrisy or subtler self-deceit--as being something else.”
50. “One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become less than human.”
51. "Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief."
52. “People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on "being in love" for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change - not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last... but if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest.”
53. "Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."
54. "Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself."
55. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
56. “Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”
57. “Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....”
58. “… the Fox would say, ”Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced to last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, not let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
59. “The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”
60. "The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time."
61. “The most important events in every age never reach the history books.”
62. “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
63. “I pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others. In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?" / The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.”
64. “The problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
65. “The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.”
66. "The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not."
67. “The safest road to hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
68. “The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will.”
69. “The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look "inside ourselves" and to see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a momement before is stopped by the act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind by is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or tract or by-product for the activities themselves. That is how men may come to beleive that thought is only unspoken words, or the appreciation of poetry only a collection of mental pictures, when these in reality are what the thought or the appreciation, when interrupted, leave behind--like the swell at sea, working after the the wind has dropped. Not, of course, that these activities, before we stopped them by introspection, were unconscious. We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of the twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.”
70. “The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers "I've read it already" to be a conclusiveargument against reading a work… Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work, ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”
71. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
72. "The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it."
73. "This extraordinary pride in being exempt from temptation that you have not yet risen to the level of. Eunuchs boasting of their chastity."
74. “This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
75. "This moment contains all moments."
76. “To enjoy a book… I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I beginby making a map on one of the end leafs; then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page. Finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. / I often wonder -- considering how many people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrapbooks -- why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine- nibbed pen in my hand. One is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.”
77. "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
78. "Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe."
79. “We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
80. “We continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. in a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
81. “We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal.”
82. ”When I was ten, I red fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly.”
83. "Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?"
84. "Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?"
85. “Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.”
86. "You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness."
87. "You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read."
88. "You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter."
