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natives who were laughing with that light, eternal laughter which is their way of enduring all things
I don’t know where the English dug up all that damned self-assurance, but T imagine it’s just part of their sense of humor.
the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us
There's one merit nobody will ever be able to take away from the Communists: that of having looked man in the face. They didn't send him to Eton to learn protective coloration. Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge
on an island and behaving like an ostrich— being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins.
Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its tnink inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?
that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind,
He had spent five years in the Sahara himself, at the head of a Camel Corps unit, and those years had been the happiest of his life.It was true that in the desert a man felt less lonely than elsewhere, perhaps because he lived there in constant, almost physical contact with the sky, and so had all the company he needed. For what remained, a pipe was enough.
He wanted to say all this to Haas, but his years in the desert hadn’t made him very talkative, and he also noticed that certain things which he felt deeply changed their meaning at the touch of words, so that he could no longer recognize them himself as he spoke. So that indeed he often wondered whether thinking were enough, whether thoughts were not a mere groping for something that was forever out of reach, whether days of real vision were not still ahead, and whether the mysterious cells which lay still unused in man’s brain would not, one day, lead toward light.
he felt less and less need to exchange ideas with other men, because essentially they no longer came to him as questions, but as certainties.
the man who changed species’ and of the last ‘fighter for dignity.’
Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it freedom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural splendor.”
people who mistake their private neurosis for a philosophical outlook.”
Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it free- dom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural .splendor.
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