“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.

I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

In art economy is always beauty.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

The glory of wealth and of beauty is fleeting and frail; virtue is illustrious and everlasting.

In any art, you don’t know in advance what you want to say – it’s revealed to you as you say it. That’s the difference between art and illustration.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Action illustrates desire.

I may do some good before I am dead–be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should make one.

Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.