“Tolerance is only another name for indifference.”

It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.

if you’d ever had a grown-up daughter you’d know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her – well, it’s much better to pretend you’re the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.

They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.

It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.

When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet.

I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.

They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thyme crushed under their bodies. A reed-warbler sang a beautiful little song in the reeds below, and then another answered.

“Heaven help us,” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it’s own reward?

Do not expect good from another’s death.