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.

Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

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.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is...

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma.

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.

Ending is better than mending.

Liberties aren't given, they are taken.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.

Pain was a fascinating horror

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.

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.

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

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....

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

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

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

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

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

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

No social stability without individual stability.

Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

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 like being myself. Myself and nasty.

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