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

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

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.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.

The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us. People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves.

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.