To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

‎"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.