Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.