until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

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

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.