The Reading Room

“I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.”

“After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.”

“Change is the only evidence of life.”

“You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.”

“We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.”

“There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.”

“I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.”

“The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.”

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.”

“The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”

“Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.”

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.”

“Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid'; the player who is finally left with it has lost.”

“No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.”

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.”

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

“Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”

“In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.”

“We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.”

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.”

“Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.”

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”

“Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”

“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

“Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution of energy...”

“Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

“Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.”