History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.