The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

• Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
• God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
• I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
• Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
• No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.
• No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.
• To love at all is to be vulnerable.
• Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
• Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
• Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?