every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

Unhappy people are dangerous.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

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

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.