Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.

I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.