When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure the comfort.

The truth is revealed to those who desire to know, but also to those who will take the time to take action to counter or further the truths they have come to know..

You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept… You are not a concept, Africa. You are a glimpse of the infinite.

We love peace, as we abhor pusillanimity; but not peace at any price.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

Marvin Gaye was one of the coolest. I look to him as a style icon and as an artist.

I'd killed him in the end, but revenge only makes things all better in the movies. In real life, once the villain is dead the trauma lives on inside the victims.

It's a crooked system, but gin straight take the pain away.

I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.