The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

We can only learn to love by loving.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.