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

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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.

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.

This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

I’m not sure how to describe my style. A lot of my work is dark and looks a bit sad, which is strange because I’m such a smiley, over-the-top positive guy who wears gold shoes most days.

My soul gathers the breaths of my sanity and beholds them in the jar like fireflies on a dark night.

The only morality in a cruel world is chance.

I’m the ruler in my kingdom and my dark seat is hot. Step into my world and your heartbeat stop!

I am trying my hardest to stay away from the horror movies just because I feel like people are thinking that’s what I do, that I’m a scream queen. I’d like to stay away from that.

Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave ‘s narrowness, though not its peace.