We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.