Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

I never accepted a knighthood because to me, is honour enough?

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.