Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.