There was no cure for the human condition because every man read the present and plotted the future in the light of his own past.

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

No man - prince, peasant, pope - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!