If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

[M]an is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'