“To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

To understand all is to forgive all.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.

I guess I’m just quite observant and I pay attention to a lot of things. Human behavior really fascinates me.

The fact is, I need God to help me love God. And if I need His help to love Him, a perfect being, I definitely need His help to love other, fault-filled humans.

Compassion allows us to understand that, as citizens of the planet, we’re all in this together and that in order to ensure our survival we must hold and cultivate a new and larger vision of what’s possible for ourselves and for the human race as a whole.

Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.

Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

The greatest human attainment in all the world is for a life to be so surrendered to Him that the name of God Almighty will be glorified through that life.