“You don’t really know a woman until she writes you a letter.”

Feminine intuition, a quality perhaps even rarer in women than in men.

A butler in an English household should, however, be English, and as much like an archbishop as possible.

an optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.

It’s always something to get one’s wish, even if the wish is a failure.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Fog and hypocrisy – that is to say, shadow, convention, decency – these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

Since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women.

All really frank people are amusing, and would remain so if they could remember that other people may sometimes want to be frank and amusing too.

As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.

Everything comes to the man who won’t wait.

Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from.

The Futurists?…. Well, of course, they are already past.

It depresses me, since naturally it gives the contrary impression. It can’t be real. It ought to be but it isn’t. If the noisy person meant what he said, he wouldn’t say it.

envy, as a rule, is of success rather than of merit. No one would have objected to his talent deserving recognition – only to his getting it.

To a woman–I mean, a nice woman–there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.

Looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin,

I don’t know where this Arctic wind has come from but it’s freezing!

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying

Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes.

A true friend never asks of you what they know you would never ask of them.

All of it! – was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

Murphys law of economic policy’: Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed.

But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.