Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilized life the opportunities for it are only too rare.

To visit a new country for the first time is great fun; but it is even greater fun to introduce somebody else to a country that you know.

There was one bursting now, a delicate constellation of many-coloured stars which drifted down and lingered in the still air.... The final rocket went up, a really large one, a piece of reckless extravagance. Its sibilant uprush was impressive, dragonlike; it soared twice as high as any they had had before.... The sparks from the rocket came pouring down the sky in a slow golden cascade, vanishing one by one into a lake of darkness.

swans ... always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail.

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

Physical weather certainly is beyond our control. ... But human weather - the psychological climate of the world - is not beyond our control. The human race is its own rain and its own sun. It creates its own cyclones and anti-cyclones. The ridges of high pressure which we sometimes enjoy, the troughs of low pressure which we so often endure, are of our own making and nobody else's.

It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.