Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.

There is one vast human experience that confronts us so formidably that we cannot pretend to overlook it. There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, by taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists.

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.

The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.