Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.

I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.