Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

Truth is the only good and the purest pity. ... Men lie for profit or for pity. All lies turn to poison, but a lie that is told for pity or shame breeds such a host of ills that no power on earth can compass their redemption.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.