The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.