I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.

You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.