“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

Sooner or later; one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

When I was doing Bean more than I’ve done him in the last few years, I did strange things – like appearing on chat shows in character as Mr. Bean.

Don’t be concerned with other people’s impressions of you. They are dazzled and deluded by appearances. Stick with your purpose. This alone will strengthen your will and give your life coherence.

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.

Truth is like the stars; it does not appear except from behind obscurity of the night.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.