now. ” She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful.

We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.

So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that...

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it...

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when...

There is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from...

Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and...

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

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...

There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies!...

Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman’s tenderness.

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.

Why children?’ he asked. ‘Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

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...

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...

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,...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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,...

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.

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

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.

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...

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!

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...