The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.

Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.