12 quotes
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.
Island (1962)
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.
Island (1962)
Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof — that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.
Island (1962)
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Island (1962)
All gods are home-made, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours
Island (1962)
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Island (1962)
[W]hich is better — to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?
Island (1962)
[H]istory is — the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.
Island (1962)
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and money-lenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
Island (1962)
Patriotism is not enough. But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.
Island (1962)
No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.
Island (1962)
Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
Island (1962)