An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
All men are equal – all men, that is, who possess umbrellas.
I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
It was unbearable, and he thought again, ‘How unhappy I am!’ and became happier.
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
There’s enough sorrow in the world, isn’t there, without trying to invent it.
Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.
Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness’s.
It is not that the Englishman can’t feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did.
Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life.
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.