I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard -it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

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

Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.