Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
The planet’s tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.
How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do””Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity…You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)
I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar. It’s a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I’m afraid.
The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or
Books… are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ’em, then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: “You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls”; if the answer is, “But I don’t,” there is no more to be said.
Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him — or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.
[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can’t find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
What’ll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?” demanded Miss Ha
It will be sent that, although the writer’s love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.
That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.
A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job.”“Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.
Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper
The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.
But that’s men all over … Poor dears, they can’t help it. They haven’t got logical minds.
I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.
There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.
At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!
…After all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.
I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.
Some people’s blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.
The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.
People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.
The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.
Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.
Do you know how to pick a lock?””Not in the least, I’m afraid.””I often wonder what we go to school for,” said Wimsey.
Salcombe Hardy groaned: “How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother’s knee.
(One character on another:)”Don’t you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?
We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.
She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.
For God’s sake, let’s take the word ‘possess’ and put a brick round its neck and drown it … We can’t possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.
Heaven deliver us, what’s a poet? Something that can’t go to bed without making a song about it.
I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson, and you need not say what you were just going to say, because I admit it all.
People who make some other person part of their job are dangerous.
A continued atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven’t got any of your own.
What we make is more important than what we are particularly if making is our profession.
You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.
The worst sin-perhaps the only sin- passion can commit is to be joyless.
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman. But an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any force.
Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
I love you – I am at rest with you – I have come home.
Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.
The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.
Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.