“Ideas are fatal to caste.”
“Unless we remember we cannot understand.”
“Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.”
“Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.”
“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”
“Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.”
“The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.”
“One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.”
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
“Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
“Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”
“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”
“Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.”
“Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.”
“Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”
“Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.”
“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
“There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.”
“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”