Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

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.

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.