When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.

The exhaustion of the passions is the beginning of wisdom.

When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.

It's a very remarkable story. Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away.

We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.

The right mixture of caring and not caring - I suppose that's what love is.

In a small cathedral town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on.

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.

And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

You will have Time, that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it.

This storm you talk of . . .t will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos.

People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.

There's only one thing more important... and that is, after you've done what you set out to do, to feel that it's been worth doing.