Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

If God charged us for every tear He shed for us, the world would be bankrupt.

Embrace love while you have life.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

I carry around such a load of non-specific guilt that every time the metal detector beeps, I always have a wild fear that this trip I absent-mindedly packed a Luger.

The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.

You cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up up them.

The most important thing is to be strong. With strength, one can conquer others, and to conquer others gives one virtue.

Once more consider, there is nothing, but heaven, worth setting our hearts upon.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

I think to be a good teacher you need an enormous amount of patience and I'm a very impatient person.