What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them - that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy, or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.

Americans ... attach such a fantastic importance to their baths and plumbing and gadgets of all sorts. They talk as if people could hardly be human beings without all that; we in Europe are beginning to wonder if people can be human beings with it.

do get over the idea that size has any value or merit. It is the enemy of most of the best things in the world - it is the enemy of the good life.

America ... holds up its way of life as the ideal for every nation, and seeks to impose its own standards of living - which many people think ridiculously and unwholesomely high - on others, partly of course in the search for markets. If it were openly stated that it was just a search for markets, that would be one thing, but it is not; by a tremendous propaganda campaign this materialistic conception is held up as an ideal, as somehow part of liberty, and above all, as a form of happiness.

the essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste.

As soon as you start asking what education is for, what the use of it is, you're abandoning the basic assumption of any true culture, that education is worth while for its own sake.

Mountains had taken the place of religion, had satisfied her religious sense, her need for adoration and worship as no service in any Cathedral, however sublime, had been able to do.