So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.