“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.”

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

“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 men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

“No social stability without individual stability.”

“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. 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…”

“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

“The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy …What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

“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.” A.K.A. “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”

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

“It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.”

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”

“Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

“Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, and completely unnecessary.”

“We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”

“An ‘unexciting’ truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”

– Aldous Huxley