56 quotes
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Martha Quest (1952)
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
The Four-Gated City (1969)
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006)
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
What matters most is that we learn from living.
Permission to Play : Taking Time to Renew Your Smile (2003)
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.