I distrust Great Men... I believe in aristocracy, though... Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet... They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

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.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

How do I know what I have to say wntil I see what I have said?