They can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in ...their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the... writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an airhole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,... Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, wit...h Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstacy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »