I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.
They had nothing in common but the English language.
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
History develops, art stands still.
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
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