Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.
I have used the word “attention,” which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
That’s how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that’s how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Being in love is an exhausting business.
My heart was beating like an army on the march.
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to.
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.