“Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.”

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.

Money pads the edges of things.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

We move between two darknesses.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.

So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

In the UK cycling was very popular until the end of the 1950’s but it really lost out to our love affair with the car.

Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors

Too many expedients may spoil an affair.

To separate man and woman at school, at work, at meetings, in short, to separate them at life, is the affair of perverted and fusty minds! Where there is separation, there is excessive primitiveness!

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.

The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.

Men have always looked before and after, and rebelled against the existing order. But for their divine discontent, men would not have been men, and there would have been no progress in human affairs.

Gold gives to the ugliest thing a certain charming air, For that without it were else a miserable affair.