“What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.”

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society.

I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant ‘centers of resort’.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.