“A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?”

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.

[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

The dog [in Pavlov’s experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell.

A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947)

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

So the idea of being able to shop cross-category to buy the beach bag, the summer lip gloss, and the pillows for your pool house makes it into very focused, easy life.

Possessions of this world have not been for the exclusive use by such or such category of individuals.

You taste something from St. George, even across categories – the gin, the whisky – it tastes like something from St. George. It’s the same as going to a great bar:

Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.

What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being.

I recommend you dispose of anything that does not fall into one of three categories: currently in use, needed for a limited period of time, or must be kept indefinitely.

People who can’t stay tidy can be categorized into just three types: ‘the can’t throw it away type’, ‘the can’t put it back type’, and ‘the first-two-combined’ type.

The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.