“Mereka bagaikan mata-mata pena yang menari di atas lemabaran kertas yang sama, lembaran kertas hitam. Dan hanya keberuntungan yang bisa membuat kertas itu menjadi abu-abu, karena tidak mungkin membuatnya menjadi putih bersih. Jejak hitam itu tetap ada di jalan hidup mereka. Bagi anak-anak seperti mereka, hidup benar-benar seperti mata dadu di meja judi.”

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

“He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He cared not for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life.” ”

“The things that make you a functional citizen in society – manners, discretion, cordiality – don’t necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners…”

“Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.”

“What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.”

“There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer’s chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.”

“…there is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom?”

“There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.”

“We speak the truth because we live in truth.”

“I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion – which I could see he always harbored – that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.”

“God was never created the economy.Men found it after banished from Eden.”

“This life is our shared dream.We all may meet again in reality.”

“You are going to die like a dog for no good reason”

“Thoreau was an idiot.”