“Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.”

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.

Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.

When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing – deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.

Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.

Such was not quite the condition of Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy’s soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte’s body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

It isn’t enough to love people because they’re good to you, or because in some way or other you’re going to get something by it.

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.