We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.
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.
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.
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.
The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby’s life.
However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest.
College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation.
Few of humanity’s characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.
If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.
It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men’s attitude to women, and in women’s attitude to themselves.
Venice is all sea and sculpture...
Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?
I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.