It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard -it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.