“Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.”

There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.

Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.

One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

It isn’t possible to love and to part.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “…There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect: that which is mystically spoken is but half spoken.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.

You think you’ve made something really great, but there’s a reason why it’s not resonating the way some previous work did. But it’s not that easy to just replicate.

One thing is that life’s great moments evolve from simple acts of cooperation with God’s mysterious promptings-nudges that always lean toward finding what’s been lost and freeing what’s been enslaved .

One’s life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d’you know, it’s most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.

The idea of a future without her wasn’t to be borne. She had by some mysterious metamorphosis become more beautiful than anyone else he had ever encountered.

Acting is a mysterious process.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect; as darkness is, in comparison with light–so is mystery, in comparison with knowledge.