Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.

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