The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.