"Beauty is meaningless until it is shared."

"It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life."

"it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it."

― George Orwell , Burmese Days

Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of Empire, when Burma was ruled from Del...

"It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level."

"If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" – he tapped his forehead – "and you're all right."

"The stars are a free show; it don't cost anything to use your eyes."

― George Orwell, Down and Out in Pari...

"Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side."

"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts."

― George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War

First of all the physical memories,

The sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge caval...

"It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are."

"We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive."

"Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed."

― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

The Road to Wig...

"The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly."

"You're dishonoured, somehow. You've sinned. Sinned against the aspidistra."

"You talk a great deal about aspidistras," said Ravelston.

"They're a dashed important subject," said Gordon."

― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the ...

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

"Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group."

― George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius was published in February 1941, well into the Second World War, after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. It is a long essay, divide...