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

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.

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

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

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

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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

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

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

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

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

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

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.