Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring.

When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.