“He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.”

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

To understand all is to forgive all.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I’m home.

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

And perhaps the greatest paradox of all is how we stand here, fully wounded yet never more alive.

The things that made me feel dead, made me feel alive again.

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.

As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else’s.