“Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.”

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.

I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

I can buy anything I want now. It hasn’t changed me personally. It just changed what I can do for myself and my family.

It’s safe to say I changed the game and made it out the trenches.

Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.

The essential doesn’t change.