Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

Everybody knows life isn't worth living.

Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.