For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

Most people spend most of their lives doing neither what they want to be doing nor what they ought to be doing.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.