Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

Time stays, we go.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

Nature is not human hearted.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.