 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 English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme. |
| So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. |
| What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. |
| Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's. |
| No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety. |
| Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something. |
| We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. |
| 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. |
| It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools. |
| We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. |
| I'm a holy man minus the holiness. |
| 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. |
| Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love. |
