“If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.”

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

The greatest legacy we can leave our children is happy memories.

I could happily lie down and die sometimes.

True happiness lies within you.

My ideology was, if I just make very happy music, very happy music, then people will forget about whatever their problems are. I will forget about my problems.

I can give away everything I posses, but am without love, and I have no happiness

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

The key to happiness doesn’t lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel and the way they make us feel.

Be mild, and cleave to gentle things, thy glory and thy happiness be there.