The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
History develops, art stands still.
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
It isn’t possible to love and to part.
Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.
Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
Money pads the edges of things.
Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others.
The strong are so stupid.
For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
Ah, but you see, I didn’t want to be fair.
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist’s readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.