Quotes to inspire and reflect

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

As an experience, madness is terrific … and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes well out of it.

I have lost friends, some by death … others through sheer inability to cross the street.

The scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

On or about December 1910 human nature changed.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid test.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

The bonfire of the vanities.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

You can’t go home again.

Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’

Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.

What with excellent browsing and sluicing and cheery conversation and what-not, the afternoon passed quite happily.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

When Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.

It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

The world is everything that is the case.

What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

so much depends

BLANCHE : I don’t want realism.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

Time is the longest distance between two places.

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew … Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

One of us must go.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.