Malcolm Muggeridge
Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.Collection: Society
I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.Collection: Happiness
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.Collection: God
The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.Collection: Happiness
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.Collection: Truth
There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.Collection: Failure
Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.Collection: Religion
Travel, of course, narrows the mind.Collection: Travel
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.Collection: Humor
My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.Collection: Strength
History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.Collection: History
One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.Collection: Age
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.
He was not only a bore; he bored for England.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.Collection: Reality
What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.Collection: Dark
We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.Collection: States
What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.Collection: Christian
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attainedCollection: Years
Supposing you eliminated suffering, what a dreadful place the world would be! I would almost rather eliminate happiness. The world would be the most ghastly place because everything that corrects the tendency of this unspeakable little creature, man, to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He's bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered.Collection: Men
God, stay with me, let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thoughts enter my mind that are not your thoughts, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.Collection: Mind
If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.Collection: Fists
As an old man...looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about...is suffering, affliction.Collection: Men
The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.Collection: Artist
Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ...man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.Collection: Love Is
When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.Collection: Exercise
Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.Collection: Jesus
In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.Collection: Lying
Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.Collection: Christian
The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God.Collection: Mean
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.Collection: Home
Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.Collection: Media
The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.Collection: Christian
In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.Collection: Long
I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.Collection: Happiness
I have a very great respect for Americans, and having been a correspondent in this country, and I believe that Americans are people who respond much better to facts and truthful, genuine speculation, than they do to purely, kind of phoney, adulation.Collection: Country
The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.Collection: Education
I don't like seeing people angry.Collection: People
The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.Collection: Islands
A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.Collection: Society
I think that President [Dwight] Eisenhower was... did the most marvelous job in the war, not really a military job: a public relations job, and it was essential that there should be a public relations job done in the post that he had.Collection: Jobs
I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.Collection: War
It's the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it's developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it's their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.Collection: People