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Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
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Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
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People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
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Experience is not what happens to you it’s what you do with what happens to you.
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What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
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The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
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Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
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Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
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You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
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It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
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Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
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What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
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Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
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Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.