"Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another."

"Science explained people, but could not understand them."

"He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection."

"He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to."

"Faith to my mind is a stiffening process a sort of mental starch."

"The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch."

"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."

"Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes."

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

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

"Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent."

"Their color slowly faded from out of the flowers, but their scent lingered to honey the air he breathed."

"If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words."

"An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one."

"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 thing went wrong."

"For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better."

"They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation."

"Consequently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off."

"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 let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs."

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

"We move between two darknesses."

"He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him."

"People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design, there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own."

"Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes."

"If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire."

"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."

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

"The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art."

"There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line."

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

"I'm a holy man minus the holiness."

"They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls."

"Only connect!"

"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."

"It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand."

"Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something."

"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 prattle of a child."

"He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson."

"Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood."

"Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not twoAphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face."

"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness."

"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 English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme."

"Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land."

"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 and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible."

"Rickie had a young man's reticence. He generally spoke of "a friend, "a person I know, "a place I was at. When the book of life is opening, our readings are secret, and we are unwilling to give chapter and verse. Mr. Pembroke, who was half way through the volume, and had skipped or forgotten the earlier pages, could not understand Rickie's hesitation, nor why with such awkwardness he should pronounce the harmless dissyllable "Ansell."

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

"I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?"

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything."

"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 the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it."