I would probably advise myself 10 years ago not to take life too seriously and to just try to be happy.
The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.
I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring.
Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
The key to all knowledge comes in words of just one syllable, apparently. . . . There's only the last page left to write on. I'll fill it with words of just one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
It came to me that Hyde Park has never belonged to London - that it has always been , in spirit, a stretch of countryside; and that it links the Londons of all periods together most magically - by remaining forever unchanged at the heart of a ever-changing town.
Patriotism is a mystery-intangible, invisible, and yet eternal.
I’ve grown a lot, and I’m learning every week.
So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?
The world is certainty a sudden place.