Britain possesses no climate, only weather.

It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.

The trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.