Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.

Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.