The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.