People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Real worship involves waiting.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don’t expect.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
Yes, of course, there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It’s really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like “pass the gravy” is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection.