Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

Old men when they begin to hear the last trumpet, on the morning breeze, often have a kind of absent-minded smile; like people listening. And their smiles are just politeness.

Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.

A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I've no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion.

No honest hardworking official likes to see good money disappearing into the hands of the Treasury at the end of the financial year.

Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?