Others

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

A modest garden . . . contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.

Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.

To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

The greater part of the truth is always hidden, in regions out of the reach of cynicism.

What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

Man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

ADVICE IS A DANGEROUS GIFT, EVEN FROM THE WISE TO THE WISE, AND ALL COURSES MAY RUN ILL.

THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH ADVERBS.

A louse in the locks of literature.

 

God-gifted organ-voice of England,

 

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

 

Airy, fairy Lilian.

 

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

 

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,

 

There are various forms of production: artillery, automobiles, lorries. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Such things are highly necessary. Engineering things. For people’s souls. ‘Products’ are highly necessary too. ‘Products’ are very important for people’s souls. You are engineers of human souls.