“You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.”

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

It isn’t possible to love and to part.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “…There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.

Liberals get credit for good intentions, and that’s about it, because everything they do fails.

What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.

I don’t intentionally make deep movies.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The biggest coward of a man is to awaken the love of a woman without the intention of loving her.

Bad decisions, good intentions.

I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary to salvation; such as neither science nor other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit.

A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.