Society and the World

Error is acceptable as long as we are young; but one must not drag it along into old age.

There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

No great discovery was ever made in science except by one who lifted his nose above the grindstone of details and ventured on a more comprehensive vision.

If men live decently it is because discipline Saves their very lives for them.

The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices.

If you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.