Others

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

Man’s passion for truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to^reak the bank of our answers.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.