“Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”

“Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.”

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”

“[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.”

“Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.”

“Friendship is like Money; easier made than kept.”

“I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?”