For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.