We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.

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

At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.