The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.