But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not...

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own...

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment...

It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Fed by neither Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward . . . He hadn’t a God or a lover–the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease,...

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

I’m afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

Most of us are pseudo-scholars…for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as...

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement … It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss,...

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on...

The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see, dear; it’s...

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

We move between two darknesses.

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little...

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever....

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the...

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India—a hundred Indias—whispered outside...

Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely...

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself....

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

Only connect!

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: “Do not...

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king...

Courage and love.”She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems,...

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her...

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even...

Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what...

And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may...

He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd instinct does not flourish.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.

I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere.” Liking her better, he smiled and said, “It’ll get us to heaven.” “Will it?” “If heaven existed.” “Do you not believe...

And she began the oft-told tale of a lady of imperial descent who could find no husband in the narrow circle where her pride permitted her to mate, and had lived on unwed, her age...

We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity–not the decorous religion...

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.Originally...