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

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

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

We can only learn to love by loving.

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

He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.