“Most vices… demand considerable self-sacrifice. There is no greater mistake than to suppose the vicious life is the life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful—if strenuously led—as Christian’s in Pilgrims Progress.”

“There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem. There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem”

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

“Dualism... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.”

“Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”

“One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?”

“The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.”