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

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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

If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.