All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
Become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes.
Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.
Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, "What would the world be like if it were true?" The operationist asks, "What would we have to do to come to believe it?" For the pragmatist the question is, "What would we do if did believe it?"
There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.