We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.
We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it’s to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.
I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.
Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.
We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile.
Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom – in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve – or could contrive – anything better.
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.
We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.
The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.
I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.
In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.
If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.