How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die.
I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.
The pacifist’s task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.
There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.
All that a pacifist can undertake – but it is a very great deal – is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.
The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream.
Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
An author who waits for the right ‘mood’ will soon find that ‘moods’ get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.
I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May.
We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.
Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war.
So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.
I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.