Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.