Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying.

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

The real heretic is not the atheist or agnostic (who are often decent people) but those who murmur "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it makes you feel good." This turns religion into a subjective matter, like taste in furnishings, and robs theology of its claim to ultimate truth.

The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.