“One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”

I will begin with the self-styled “Christian” party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.

The one self- knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

Youre not going to drive me home? I asked. A waste of breath, since i knew her answer. Theres fog. Patchy fog. Vee grinned. Oh, boy. He is so on your mind. Not that i blame you. Personally, im hoping i dream about him tonight.

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no communism.

And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

Maybe my life isn’t great. We don’t have all the answers. Look at it from my side.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Sometimes if you have a difficult decisin to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.