As long as we're preoccupied with our former traumas and triumphs, or our fears and dreams about what might happen down the road, or who said what to whom, it's very difficult to appreciate and...
Yossarian was committing his traditional rights of freedom and independence with the boldness of exercising them.
opting for happiness and contentment is a decision that we can make at any time and that needs to be continually remade at every turn.
If you really want to be afraid for mankind, you don't even need to know who Paul Ryan is. All you have to do is lurk for five minutes by the pharmacy.
The lesson here is that a giant cupcake tattoo is typically an indication of two things: {1} Sister go her hands on some crystal meth, and {2} Sister smoked that crystal meth and kept smoking it until...
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
Watching Italians eat {especially men, I have to say} is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute...
It's amazing the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common passage.
In this particular lifestyle the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat
We are obliged to live as if there's meaning in life, without any guarantee that there is.
pleasure and pain arise from virtuous and non-virtuous actions which come not from outside, but from within yourself.
How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of...
All seasons have something to offer
The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of insider vs. outsider. When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first...
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant {among other things} that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep,...
When the senile patient awakens in the morning and asks for his mother, remind him that she is long since dead, that he is over eighty years old and living in a convalescent home, and that this is...
I resemble that worm which crawls through dust,Lives in the dust, eats dustUntil a passerby's foot crushes it.
Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even...
What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
We're all dreaming, Arctor said. If the last to know he's an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of...
Like all trial attorneys, he knew the importance of not dressing too well.
There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no...
Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more...
Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale. sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence
Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
All the happiness and virtue in this world come from selflessness and generosity, all the sorrow from egotism, selfishness, and greed.
The past is over, and the future is unknown. We can dwell in the imagined worlds of yesterday and tomorrow if we so choose. But the more we do so, the more we miss out on life itself as it is...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...