“Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism.

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

Fearlessness may be a gift, but perhaps most precious is courage from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions.

Perhaps there is no position more perilous to a man’s honesty thanthat?of knowing himselftobe quiteloved by a girl whom he almost loves himself.

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.

If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.