We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

History develops, art stands still.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.