Quotations

Ziyong asked, Is there one word that can be practiced for the whole of one’s life? The Master said, That would be “empathy” perhaps: what you do not wish yourself do not do unto others.

I have five pebbles, not too different in size and weight, yet a randomness about them. If I drop them on the carpet they will scatter.

Next is he who cultivates the shoots of goodness. The shoots being cultivated he is able to attain to truthfulness.

“To be true is the Way of heaven. To make oneself true is the Way of man.

“You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” Smith would say. “Especially sheep fence.” (Clunk!) “But cow fence too. Any fence.”

“Who invented barbed wire anyhow?” Hayduke asked. (Plunk!)

I went for a rug-rethink in Queensway this afternoon. Fifteen quid, just for a feminine touch. That was all I was after. The smocked chick fingered my hair and said in her stupid voice, ‘You’re receding.’ ‘We all are,’ I said. We all are.

And now I am one of the unemployed. What do we do all day? We sit on stoops and pause in loose knots on the stained pavements.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

With about twenty hours of solitude a day, I had plenty of time to think in prison. If Pentonville was a factory, what would it make? If it was a machine, what was it designed to do?