The majority of Australians gifted with abnormal intelligence use it striving to be more normal than everybody else. The rest use it striving to be more abnormal than they already were.
Although we share fundamental beliefs, we differ on the fundamentals. I believe they should be articulated, he thinks articulating them is a crime.
How often has it come about that psychoanalysis has neuroticised the patient so that it may better learn what it feels it ought to talk to him about?
You have an inalienable right to beat up on yourself. But like most rights I have no idea where it comes from.
A true convention is one that people don’t know they’re scared to death of transgressing – until it passes away, when they become scared to death by its absence.
Moral philosophy. Every man his own police officer.
To annihilate clichés, to speak past them as if they never existed, to play with truth as with a theme are the three main works of genius. The work of journalism in general is turning truth into clichés, the speciality of the arts pages is discovering truth in cliché.
A man discovers what he thinks is a pandemic viral strain. But all he has to describe it are euphemisms and clichés. These communicate themselves. Everyone instantaneously catches the disease.
The easiest way of overcoming vulgarity is becoming a snob.
The heavenly dispensation represented by the reign of communications technology will be a paradise indistinguishable at times from a devilish conspiracy to keep our dear ones at a distance, to garble their words of encouragement, to blur and invert their looks of warmth and love, to translate their deeds into gestures and their gestures into signs of problems.
My philosophy is a reflex to work off the bad impressions other people’s thoughts have made on me.
The essential work required in preparing to write a book is marshalling all the useable prejudices you have at your disposal.
The miners survived because of their inadvertent discovery of a Land of Culture
In my notebook I write down all the errors and partialities I have at any time been subject to in the hope that I may no longer be subject to them and so that the foolish and the desperate might one day consider them a higher work of art that never bothered to compose itself.
A book that didn’t spend the main part of its gestation a lone affair of the author is an offence against the shame of book-writing.
The Armstrongians are those who begin inspired by Goethe’s universality and end trying to imitate his stolidity.
Never feel obliged by another man’s metaphors. Freedom consists in an essential sense in a relation to language.
A moralist threw a dress-up party the theme of which was mortal sin. Micky came as lust, tried groping the breasts of the hostess and was thrown out.
Australians have no traditions. But we mean them.
In comedy all misunderstandings are honourable occasions.
Most men and women who once acted with a degree of social or intellectual independence nowadays have to be their own secretaries. Which means they have to do the bidding of super-secretaries from marketing and accounts. The latter don't wield power absolutely, they wield it super-absolutely, mechanistically - in such a way that its cruelties, irrationalities and inanities appear to happen of their own accord.
His sabbatical was the intellectually most desperate six months of his life. He had no female undergraduates to garner ideas about himself from.
The bourgeois believes that culture consists in having good intentions.
The yob believes culture is an unsubstantiated pretence.
The snob believes culture consists in showing the yobs who’s who.
The intellectual believes culture is society’s duty to pay him enough to read books so that he can buy other books.
To the aesthete culture is the temple before which he stands guard – as one of the temple slaves.
To the artist it is a genuine mood in which his highest feelings and his darkest thoughts can equally have life and which, apart from that, he often curses.
The closest the bourgeois gets to revenging himself on his country for its injustices is having the newspaper delivered.
Animals are more truly amused by tv than any human being I know. They intuitively realise that what they see there are just human beings forming colourful patterns by going through the motions. Whereas human beings can’t help looking to tv for signs of a reality beyond tv that is either not there in any sense or that tv itself induces to purport to exist.
To resist the compulsion to abbreviate is the closest you can come to civil disobedience. Spelling your words is conscientious objection to the war on language being conducted every day by means of language.
The explanatory/scientific = to trace the unknown back to the known.
The mystic/artistic = to re-submit the known to the tribunal of the unknown and unknowable.
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