If you have been sunned through and through like an apricot on a wall from your earliest days, you are oversensitive to any withdrawal of heat.

There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.

The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.

the announcement that you are going to tell a good story (and the chuckle that precedes it) is always a dangerous opening.

It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

[On spiritualism:] I always knew the living talked rot, but it's nothing to the rot the dead talk.

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.