To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.