In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.

Good action and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the result of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called "the I, me, mine," we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood - and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration.

Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.