If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.