One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.

This life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened; To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish; Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.

Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

Secrecy is as essential to intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass or darkness to a spiritualist séance and must at all times be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

As an old man...looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about...is suffering, affliction.

The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.

There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.