The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.