It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.

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

youth looks at its world and age looks through it; youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule.

monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.