WednesdayJan 28, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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 for Art's sake.
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
Books have to be read. It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
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.
I suggest that 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 gone ourselves.
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
[The Englishman] has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks his pipe might fall out if he did.
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
Beethovens Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of Man.
Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
Spoon-feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think creation's.
Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria; the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms; grin like a dog and run about through the city.
They go forth [into the world] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart not a cold one. The difference is important.
The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
Railway termini ... are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
Riposte of 'that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical,' Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
Only connect!
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