Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.