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

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.