There's Nothing Is This World More Instinctively

Its Avowed Purpose Is To Excite Sexual Desire, Which, I Should Have Thought, Is Unnecessary In The Case Of The Young, Inconvenient In The Case Of The Middle Aged, And Unseemly In The Old.

The Greatest Artists, Saints, Philosophers, And, Until Quite Recent Times, Scientists... Have All Assumed That The New Testament Promise Of Eternal Life Is Valid.... I'd Rather Be Wrong With Dante And Shakespeare And Milton, With Augustine Of Hippo And Francis Of Assisi, With Dr. Johnson, Blake, And Dostoevsky Than Right With Voltaire, Rousseau, The Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, And Bernard Shaw.

The English Have This Extraordianry Respect For Longevity. The Best Example Of This Was Queen Victoria, A Most Unpleasant Woman Who Achieved A Sort Of Public Affection Simply By Living To Be An Enormous Age.

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.

Posterity Will Surely Be Amazed, And I Hope Vastly Amused, That Such Slipshod And Unconvincing Theorizing Should Have So Easily Captivated Twentieth-century Minds And Been So Widely And Recklessly Applied.