Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

We can only learn to love by loving.

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.