Reviews
Highlights
“One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.
Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation. Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a fully human being.”
Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism.”
“Grace is the first mouthful of each course—chewed and chewed until there’s nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.”
Give us another century, and our average IQ will be up to a hundred and fifteen.” “Whereas ours, at the present rate of progress, will be down to about eighty-five. Better medicine—more congenital deficiencies preserved and passed on. It’ll make things a lot easier for future dictators.” At the thought of this cosmic joke he laughed aloud.
a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing
that’s yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures.”
Be fully aware of what you’re doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living.”
“But what you can get out of a book is never it.
read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sidedness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters—and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking.”
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
they’re perfectly happy, and they don’t want anything else.” “What a blessed state!” “There’s nothing blessed about it,” Murugan snapped. “It’s just stupid and disgusting. No progress, only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they’re all given.”
Caslon and Bodoni,
“to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.”
In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It’s had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone’s colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us alone and we’re still Buddhists or Shivaites—that is, when we’re not Tantrik agnostics.” “Is that what you are?” Will enquired. “A Tantrik agnostic?” “With Mahayana trimmings,” Ranga qualified. “Well, to return to Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn’t. No harbor, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about its being God’s will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. And that isn’t our only blessing: After a hundred and twenty years of the Portuguese, Ceylon and Rendang got the Dutch. And after the Dutch came the English. We escaped both those infestations. No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labor, no cash crops for export, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”
God is Dipa’s alibi. Why can’t criminals be frank about what they’re up to?
“And which are the best answers?” “None of them is best without the others.”