Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.

Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.

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

All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.