When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

They... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this - animated, but collateral.

Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.