Question authority; but, raise your hand first.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
. . . Dealing with these sexual disorders, you ask 'what is it supposed to look like?' 'what's the norm?' The norm is the heterosexual design of the body
. . . testifying for Dr. Privitera. . . To these 19 cancer victims, the enforcement of (California) Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701. 1, the denial of them medical treatment, albeit unorthodox, albeit unapproved by a state agency, must surely take on a Kafka-esque, a nightmare quality. No demonstrated public anger, no compelling interest of the state warrants an Orwellian intrusion into the most private of zones of privacy.
He was a puzzle. And Hyacinth hated puzzles. Well, no, in truth she loved them. Provided, of course, that she solved them.
Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.