“...and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...”

“The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.”

“A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.”

“I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.”

“SEPTIMUS: My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire --LADY CROOM: Oh....!SEPTIMUS: -- I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face.(Pause.)LADY CROOM: I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodge. I hope I am more than a match for Mrs Chater with her head in a bucket. Does she wear drawers?SEPTIMUS: She does.LADY CROOM: Yes, I have heard that drawers are being worn now. It is unnatural for women to be got up like jockeys. I cannot approve.”

“LADY CROOM: ....My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp. What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine for the mud that was lacking in the dell. (Pointing through the window) What is that cowshed?NOAKES: The hermitage, my lady?LADY CROOM: It is a cowshed.NOAKES: It is, I assure you, a very habitable cottage, properly founded and drained, two rooms and a closet under a slate roof and a stone chimney --LADY CROOM: And who is to live in it?NOAKES: Why, the hermit.LADY CROOM: Where is he?NOAKES: Madam?LADY CROOM: You surely do not supply an hermitage without a hermit?NOAKES: Indeed, madam --LADY CROOM: Come, come, Mr Noakes. If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water. What hermits do you have?NOAKES: I have no hermits, my lady.LADY CROOM: Not one? I am speechless.NOAKES: I am sure a hermit can be found. One could advertise.LADY CROOM: Advertise?NOAKES: In the newspapers.LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.”

“We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.”