Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me

It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.

Female beauty is an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.

Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.