Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not. |
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice. |
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. |
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. |
Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life. |
Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty. |
Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas --stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety. |
Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points. |
Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness. |
The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach. |
The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal. |
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript. |
The people who have really made history are the martyrs. |
The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing. |
The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell. |