The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
