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

To eat, teeth must meet.

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

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.