“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”

Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

… there are shadows because there are hills.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.

Money pads the edges of things.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.

They are essentially commitments and attitudes that foster collaboration and positive collective action.

How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out.

We don’t work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.