A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.
Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.
Hell is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on earth is done in their name: where else but in hell should they have their reward?
You may remember that on Earth--though of course we never confessed it--the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
Written over the gate here are the words "Leave every hope behind, ye who enter." Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
I was a hypocrite; and it served me right to be sent to heaven.
... for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do.
At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven.
The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer "Make me a healthy animal."
But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation.
And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent philosophers.
What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting.
...Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it.
Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.
When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means."
The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
I have had my share of vanity; for as a young man I was admired by women; and as a statue I am praised by art critics.
Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst moments of superstitious terror on earth did I dream that Hell was so horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of sweetness, like a confectioner's shopboy.
Were I not possessed with a purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher; for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the bosom of his wife with less misgiving.
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.
This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.
ANA. ...Tell me where can I find the Superman? ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A father--a father for the Superman!
[between his teeth] Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.
Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
The Golden Rule
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
Kings are not born: they are made by universal hallucination.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
Happiness and beauty are by-products.
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.
The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. Where there is no ventilation fresh air is declared unwholesome. Where there is no religion hypocrisy becomes good taste. Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
Those who understand evil pardon it: those who resent it destroy it.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him than any one ever will.
Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.
Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are…
We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad-boy husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a bloodsucker, a hypocrite and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy!
p. 51 Straker: That's because you never done any, Mr Robinson
... the book about the bird and the bee is natural history. It's an awful lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will remain so until it shuts behind you for ever.
Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.
In short, the way to avoid misunderstanding is for everybody to lie and slander and insinuate and pretend as hard as they can. That is what obeying your mother comes to.
As he comes along the drive from the house with Mrs Whitefield he is sedulously making himself agreeable and entertaining, and thereby placing on her slender wit a burden it is unable to bear.
You can be as romantic as you please about love, Hector; but you mustn't be romantic about money.