One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
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.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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.
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.
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
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.
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
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.