Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.