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.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

No one is India.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.