The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.

Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.

The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.

I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

Every time you respond in a certain fashion, it gets easier and easier to respond.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

When I was on my own in a hotel room in Romania, I had the imagination to keep myself occupied.

I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.

Even now when I am answering a question I am at the height of my own meditation.

Even the lowest of the Hindus, the Pariah, has less of the brute in him than a Briton in a similar social status.