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

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.

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.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.