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.

There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

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

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.