“Society is built on marriage … marriage and its consequences.”

It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal.

How to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

Headlines twice the size of the events.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one’s work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature.

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

The building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

Beginnings are always messy.

Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious – there was generally some reason for it.

Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

He might wish and wish and never get it – the beauty and the loving in the world!

We have known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men’s souls.

Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.

We are not living in a private world of our own.

There’s been so much wealth built up that we really can feel spending for some time.

If women built the bridges or were meant to build the bridges, then they would have done it.

Well-observed facts, though brought to light by passing theories, will never die; they are the material on which alone the house of science will at last be built.

There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate

She built her castle at rock bottom.

I built a kingdom out of heartache and it is glorious.

You were built to love.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.