“I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.”

One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.

We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.

We’re not savages. We’re English.

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

You’ll get back to where you came from.

People complain that our generation has no philosophers.

As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God’s anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex.

God, the true Philosopher’s Stone, Who answers every prayer, Lies hidden deep within your heart.

To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man’s, into the world, as it is God’s.

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.

If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women.

A heathen philosopher once asked a Christian, ‘Where is God’? The Christian answered, ‘Let me first ask you, Where is He not?’

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.