“Assumptions are dangerous things.”

But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.

To every problem, there is a most simple solution.

Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.

There are questions that you don’t ask because you’re afraid of the answers to them.

I learned that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn’t it?

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming… suddenly you find – at the age of 50, say – that a whole new life has opened before you.

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

If you’ve had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

As water by cooling and condensation becomes ice, so thought by condensation assumes physical form. Everything in the universe is thought in material form.

The potential infinite means nothing other than an undetermined, variable quantity, always remaining finite, which has to assume values that either become smaller than any finite limit no matter how small, or greater than any finite limit no matter how great.

we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves… But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves — unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.

Never assume that you can make it alone. You need the help of the Lord. Never hesitate to get on your knees in some private place and speak with Him.

Nothing is more destined to create deep-seated anxieties in people than the false assumption that life should be free from anxieties.

An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

You proceed from a false assumption: I have no ego to bruise.