They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

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

The strong are so stupid.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

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.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.