 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another. |
| The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists. |
| Reverence is fatal to literature. |
| 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. |
| To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. |
| 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. |
| Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable. |
| I am certainly an ought and not a must. |
| I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. |
| One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys. |
| 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. |
| Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes. |
| The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race. |
| The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. |
| 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. |
| The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot. |
| Nonsense and beauty have close connections. |
