Life and Existence

Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

The woman is perfected

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael: it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.

FIRE . God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

‘God is or he is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? … Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate the two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.

Excuse my dust.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

Let us sleep now.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings … these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself.

A God-intoxicated man. of Spinoza

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that Fate and character are the same conception.

Rattle his bones over the stones;