We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled—and it sleeps for ever in most historians—there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.