Quotes

To divest oneself of unnecessary possessions, and mainly of other people: that was the business of life.

The way to every creature's heart was through the belly. This was why women had insisted on the prerogative of being allowed to cook.

It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.

On his novel "The Once and Future King": I got desperate among my books and picked Malory up in lack of anything else. Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) The thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning and (b) the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast... Anyway, I somehow started writing a book.

The fisherman fishes as the urchin eats cream buns, from lust.

Dogs, like very small children, are quite mad.

You will learn that owls are the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise.

They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves.

Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?

Slaughter anybody who is better than you are, and then we shall be equal soon enough. All equally dead.

Aviators live by hours, not by days.

Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think. Opinion can never stand beside truth.

I would recommend a solo flight to all prospective suicides. It tends to make clear the issue of whether one enjoys being alive or not.

Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically - to those who hardly think about us in return.

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn!

I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe.

The business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.

The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.

If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.

There are no boundaries among the geese. How can you have boundaries if you fly?