Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must be "contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.

A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.