How does life become totally painful By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows. Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.

One's attitude toward life makes every possible difference in one's living. You know, you don't have to study a thousand ancient books to discover that fact. But sometimes it needs to be pointed out again that life doesn't change so much as you. ... The day when you stop building your own environment, when you stop building your own surroundings, when you stop waving a magic hand and gracing everything around you with magic and beauty, things cease to be magical, things cease to be beautiful. Well, maybe you've just neglected somewhere back in the last few years to wave that magic hand.

Because the artist deals in future realities, he always seeks improvements or changes in the existing reality. This makes the artist, inevitably and invariably, a rebel against the status quo. The artist, day by day, by postulating the new realities of the future, accomplishes peaceful revolution.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that, you have lost everything.

Dianetics is a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.

It is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the happiest mothers.

To be happy, one only must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are. Unhappiness is only this the inability to confront that which is.