There is an unlucky tendency ... to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better.

things in this world are very roughly averaged and although averaging is a useful, rapid way of dispatching business, it does undoubtedly waste a great deal which is too good for wasting.

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

Art is the expression of a man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to the universe's unspoken message.

What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

There is no end to the deceits of the past.

Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. ... What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

Some persons' letters seem almost framed to afford a series of alibis for their personality.

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

There is too little courtship in the world.

Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers.

There is too little courtship in the world. ... For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes, and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways a sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain an undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.

A deal of the world's sound happiness is lost through Shyness.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.