The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.