All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.