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

“A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.”

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

“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?”

“Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. ”

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”

“To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.”