A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.

Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark But even so, wise dogs don't bark. Only mongrels make it hard For the milkman to come up the yard.