If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

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

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

Fiction is like a spiders web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

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.

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

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortunate than when they triumph.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.