Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Only connect!
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or-to put the thing less cynically-we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice.
The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy’s first aim was to defeat herself.
He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.