And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being.

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.