The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings.

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.