Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

Every great literature has always been allegorical - allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.