I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.