There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.

In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who 'happen to be there.' Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.