Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.

Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort.

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly become part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now for ever.

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.