Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else’s quality of mind.
Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim.
Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Hate is crystallized fear, fear’s dividend, fear objectified. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.