We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.

I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibilty of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Badness is only spoiled goodness.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.