Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

History develops, art stands still.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

No one is India.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.