No one is ever holy without suffering.
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
Of children as of procreation – the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.
To understand all is to forgive all.
I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.
I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.
But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.
Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.
There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.
My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.