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...

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some...

They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to...

Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air…

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that...

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and...

In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.

One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That’s where we practical fellows’- he smiled-‘are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and...

The doctrine of laisser-faire will not work in the material world.