The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.
The poet’s first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.
He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.
The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams – mad but interesting.
That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.
Most men – it is my experience – are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.
The first thing that happened was that Helen became an invalid – we know now that there was nothing wrong with her, but Livilla had given her the choice of taking to her bed as if she were ill or taking to her bed because she was ill.
But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.
Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus.
On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.
You don’t want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.
England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.
It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch’s wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself – either an Emperor or an idiot.
Eros aimed one of his arrows at Medea, and drove it into her heart, up to the feathers.