“Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.”

There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

She was not herself–she was not anything. She was something that is going to be–soon–soon–very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

Be a good animal,true to your instincts.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

There’s lots of good fish in the sea, maybe, but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha.

That’s how women are with me said Paul. They want me like mad but they don’t want to belong to me.

No form of theocracy, whether it’s manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally… Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.