We are reluctant to acknowledge the full scope of what we owe to luck, because our vanity rebels against the suggestion that our qualities cannot by themselves have produced our good fortune. It is hard to endure the thought that someone else might equally well have done what we have done.

We are always making gods of those who are indifferent to us, and martyrs of those who love us.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet, the most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth, for a straight-out lie can be detected and opposed, but a half-truth insinuates itself into the understanding and breeds there.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are responsible for what we make of ourselves, yet we perpetually seek to escape this responsibility through bad faith and self-deception.

The principle of parsimony suggests that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity; yet in the study of human nature, we continually discover that the simple explanation was merely the one we had grown comfortable defending.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Every man is wise when attacked by a disease from which he is never likely to suffer.

We are betrayed by what is false within ourselves.