Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.