I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts – four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, they brought all manner of wealth – the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts. A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. “There seems to be plenty of it”, was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow…. The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless…. Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctrines in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

The effects of the mescaline were already on the decline: but the flowers in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred grove. Eden alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the mystic Rose.

Beauty is worse than wine; it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.