“Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.”

The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.

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

It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn’t considered.

Its a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.