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.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.

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.

How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me ... his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.

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.

miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.