As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom.

Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.