“Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.”

Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.

We seldom find any person of good sense, except those who share our opinions.

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

We pardon to the extent that we love.

Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.

There are various sorts of curiosity; one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us; and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.

It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them.

A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.

If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.

If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

Being a Christian does not mean that there is one way of living a Christian life.

I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.

But we’ve got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it’s about being human.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.