Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

The legs, for example, of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes--or was it several centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them---or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

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.

Civilization is sterilization.