The fact is, for most of us, what happens to ourselves is so much more important than what happens to other people that the smallest mote in our own eye will prevent us from being unduly harrowed by someone else's beam.

there are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.

When you've just made the most complete fool of yourself, you feel the need of a specially high horse to ride.

There's a general consensus of opinion that people in love are apt to look silly -- except to each other.

There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

My dear father always said that when everybody had a telephone nobody would have any manners, because there wouldn't be time for them. And of course he was perfectly right.

happy people have got something to give to the world.