“And the days are not full enoughAnd the nights are not full enoughAnd life slips by like a field mouseNot shaking the grass”

“When the head of state of family thinks first of gouging out an income, he must perforce do it through small men; and even if they are clever at their job, if one employ such inferior characters in state and family business the tilled fields will go rack swamp and ruin and edged calamities will mount up to the full.... This is the meaning of: A state does not profit by profits - Pound's translation of Confucius”

“With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

“All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.”

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”

“Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”

“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”