All Happenings, Great And Small, Are Parables

It Is Only Possible To Succeed At Second-rate Pursuits - Like Becoming A Millionaire Or A Prime Minister, Winning A War, Seducing Beautiful Women, Flying Through The Stratosphere, Or Landing On The Moon. First-rate Pursuits - Involving, As They Must, Trying To Understand What Life Is About And Trying To Convey That Understanding - Inevitably Result In A Sense Of Failure. A Napoleon, A Churchill, Or A Roosevelt Can Feel Himself To Be Successful, But Never A Socrates, A Pascal, Or A Blake. Understanding Is Forever Unattainable.

As An Old Man...looking Back On One's Life, It's One Of The Things That Strikes You Most Forcibly-that The Only Thing That's Taught One Anything Is Suffering. Not Success, Not Happiness, Not Anything Like That. The Only Thing That Really Teaches One What Life's About...is Suffering, Affliction.

I Think That In Free Societies, And We're Constantly Talking About Living In Free Societies, Aren't We, In Contradiction With Unhappy People Who Live In Non-free Societies, That The Benefit, The Dividend Of Living In A Free Society Is That You Say What You Think.

There's A Large Strain Of Irony In Our Human Affairs... Interwoven With Our Affairs Is This Wonderful Spirit Of Irony Which Prevents Us From Ever Being Utterly And Irretrievably Serious, From Being Unaware Of The Mysterious Nature Of Our Existence.

I Suppose That Every Age Has Its Own Particular Fantasy: Ours Is Science. A Seventeenth-century Man Like Blaise Pascal, Who Thought Himself A Mathematician And Scientist Of Genius, Found It Quite Ridiculous That Anyone Should Suppose That Rational Processes Could Lead To Any Ultimate Conclusions About Life, But Easily Accepted The Authority Of The Scriptures. With Us, It Is The Other Way `round