“Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.”

“The good life is not found in dreams of progress,but in coping with tragic contingencies.We have been reared on religions and philosophies that deny the experience of tragedy.Can we imagine a life that is not founded on the consolations of action?Or are we too lax and coarse even to dream of living without them?”

“Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

“Humanism is not science, but religion - the post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived. In pre-Christian Europe is was taken for granted that the future would be like the past. Knowledge and invention might advance, but ethics would remain much the same. History was a series of cycles, with no overall meaning. Against this pagan view, Christians understood history as a story of sin and redemption. Humanism is the transformation of this Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence. That is why among the ancient pagans it was unknown.”

“The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.”

“In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.”

“Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.”