"Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another."

"How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"

"Ideas are fatal to caste."

"All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education."

"No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour."

"We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand."

"I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort."

"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."

"It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted."

"The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death."

"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."

"Pity, if one can generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil."

"The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world, it will acceptthose whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected."

"Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there."

"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 beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly."

"The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not."

"Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored."

"Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along."

"Failure and 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."

"And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished."

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

"And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured."

"Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes."

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

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

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

"And Englishmen like posing as gods."

"Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety."

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

"Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable."

"I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, "Man is the measure, and I went, and after many visits I found an opening."

"Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man."

"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."

"England has always been disinclined to accept human nature."

"At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity."

"What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?"

"As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent."

"Love is always being given where it is not required."

"But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable."

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

"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 with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy."

"People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness."

"Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient."

"Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's."

"Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world."

"I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends."

"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 grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave."

"She grew more and more vexed with his dignified behavior. By a cruel irony, she was drawing out what was best in his disposition."

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

"But so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means."