“One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.”

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.

I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.

That doesn’t sound like you, you ride every wave. There is one that will drown me

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.

I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.

An experience is richest not talked of.

We can only learn to love by loving.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Keep telling yourself that things are going to be easy for you even if you don’t know-how.

There’s gonna be a lot hard shit that happens in your life but the easiest thing to do is give up.

You will never reach a goal if you believe every path you take is going to be easy.

A smooth and easy life doesn’t make you successful.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Decide that you are no longer be a button that can easily be pushed to react.  

Don’t pray for an easy life, pray to be a stronger man.