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

The bicycle… has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second.

Take modern courtships! They resulted in the same thing as under George the Second, but took longer to reach it, owing to the motor-cycle and the standing lunch.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done

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.

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.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

Only brand names register in the mind… What you should generally do is take a regular word and use it out of context to connote the primary attribute of your brand.

It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon.

There are many interpretations of Islam within the wider Islamic community, but generally we are instructed to leave the world a better place than it was when we came into it.

I do feel that, generally, people will see me and go, “He knows where the good food is,” which is an awesome correlative. It’s an awesome simplification.

An artist is generally expected to stick to one motif, one persona. People get used to seeing someone put down a certain thing.