It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.