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.

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.

I look out this window and think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and the birds and everything else and I am part of it. I didn't ask to be put here. I've been lucky finding myself here.

There are still things I want to do but they're not necessary for me to do. I'm not clinging to anything that I can't open my hands and let go.

The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through.

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.

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!