International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

No great thing happens suddenly.