Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

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.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.