When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

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.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

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

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.