19 quotes
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Murder is commoner among cooks than among the members of any other profession.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
In all technologically "advanced" countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Most people are even less original in their dreaming than in their waking life; their dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more literary.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
One can only blaspheme if one believes.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
It is...axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
He suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in lonely geniuses: he never knows when to stop. Lonely people are apt to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, as Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of conceit but out of despair of finding another who will listen and respond.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Machines have no political opinions, but they have profound political effects. They demand a strict regimentation of time, and, by abolishing the need for manual skill, have transformed the majority of the population from workers into laborers. There are, that is to say, fewer and fewer jobs which a man can find a pride and satisfaction in doing well, more and more which have no interest in themselves and can be valued only for the money they provide.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)