
Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction

It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one's soul.

The symbol is greater than visible substance ... Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.

The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.

This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity ...

I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!

Freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.

Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.

There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.

The thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.

We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses ...

The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

Advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.

Christmas is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.

One life is an absurdly small allowance.

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.

The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.

I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving

I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?

I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.