What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.
First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.
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.
The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?" "That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.
I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.
The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.
It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
Old age makes caricatures of us all.
Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.
I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.
Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
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