However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

A man by himself is in bad company.

...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.