“The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Some people bear three kinds of trouble – the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

Did they look like anyone we know? For example a cross between pippi longstocking and the wicked witch of the west would obviously give us marcie millar

In the end, the only thing between us was silence.