A passage is not plain English – still less is it good English – if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.
I admit it is better fun to punt than be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.
Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.
There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one’s own limitations.
Trouble shared is trouble halved.
I am better off with vegetables at the bottom of my garden than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.
It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.
What is the use of acquiring one’s heart’s desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one’s friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?
It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.
Heaven deliver us, what’s a poet? Something that can’t go to bed without making a song about it.
If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.
Britain possesses no climate, only weather.
Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.
But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues.
Why? Oh, well – I thought you’d be rather an attractive person to marry. That’s all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can’t tell you why. There’s no rule about it, you know.
Passion’s a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love’s a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can’t rein him, it’s best to have no truck with him.
It’s very inconvenient being a sculptor. It’s like playing the double-bass; one’s so handicapped by one’s baggage.