I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant an...d cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of the general inadequacy of intellect in the conduct of life Britain is the most majestic exponent. She is instinctively disliked... by such people as French, Persians, Hindus, who are clever by nature, and think that intellect can rule. The Italians strayed down this path and disliked us too. But they, and the Greeks, and the Arabs, have a natural perception of other and greater powers and this, I think, is an affinity that binds us. With the others, with the intellectual, it is not our stupidity, but the fact that we prove it possible to live by non- intellectual standards, which makes us disliked.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for ...us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life..., or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but... he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is s...urprised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unaf...raid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct of love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »