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.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.