Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

don't sulk. you're acting just like a man.

The best lies are always flavoured with the truth but if the substance is rotten, it will stink no matter how much you try to disguise it.

Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?

Of courtesy, it is much less Than courage of heart or holiness, Yet in my walks it seems to me That the Grace of God is in courtesy.

Who is fatal to others is so to himself.

I see no thread running through my work; I simply get on with my life and my painting.

Lokmanya Tilak said "Swaraj is my birthright" but now the people of India must say, "Surajya is my birthright".

When we are on the water, our contemplative impulses range from the intense to the nearly absent.

I learned to play the piano on my mother's knee - that was before we got a piano.