One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.