“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.”

I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.

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

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.

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