Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

No one is India.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.