If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
History marches to the drum of a clear idea.
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse.
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover’s kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one’s neck.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.