Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, ot waste too much energy on other peoples' woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself... They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.