Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.