John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Environmentalist, n. A person with pretenses to a biologist’s knowledge, but who fails to grasp that natural selection makes it clear that nature must necessarily be red in tooth and claw.

“God is forward motion:” the sense of religion found among salmon and capitalists.

He was an artist more informed by a theory of aesthetics than by a sense of aesthetics.

If our eyes showed us such distorted images as our moral sense offers us, we would all surely walk off the first cliff we came across — or at the very least knock someone off.

There are many people who never attempt to seek out the causes of the events happening around them — they do not have even this most primitive sense of curiosity from which all science develops.

It is common to think that maturation is the sublimation of vice when it is really only the sublimination of it.

The people that God loves are one of the best arguments against Him.

Sexuality is the last holdover of the old cruelties that ruled men before law came into the world; within the countries of the First World, it is the last of the spheres of activity in which basic decency is still almost entirely absent.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.¹

One can substitute a few other nouns in place of “children” and find this passage still equally true.

1. Oscar Wilde : A Woman of No Importance : Act 2 ↩

Q: What is a man who is the source of his own misery?
A: A man who is the source of others’ misery.