Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution.

It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is to enjoy a good concert. But I do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.