Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.