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

Ideas are fatal to caste.

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.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

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.

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

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

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

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

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.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

History develops, art stands still.

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

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