"From quiet homes and first beginning, Out to the undiscovered ends, There's nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends."

"Of courtesy it is much less Than courage of heart or holiness Yet in my walks it seems to me That the Grace of God is in courtesy."

"Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes; Her Aunt, who from her Earliest Youth, Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth, Attempted to Believe Matilda: The effort very nearly killed her."

"Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea Are all the Human Frame requires."

"Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, "There is no Cure for this Disease.""

"It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation."

"Man may […] be master of his fate, but he has a precious poor servant. It is easier to command a lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for half-an-hour."

"Death […] people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world."

"I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end. Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal."

"I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I was "smoking the enchanted cigarettes" of Balzac, and if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings."

"Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another."

"Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!"

"'… and as to what may be in this book, do not feel timid nor hesitate to enter. There are more mountains than molehills …'"

"Oh! let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about!"

"The Microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all, But many sanguine people hope To see him through a microscope."

"The Llama is a wooly sort of fleecy hairy goat, With an indolent expression and an undulating throat Like an unsuccessful literary man."

"What! Would you slap the Porcupine? Unhappy child — desist! Alas! That any friend of mine Should turn Tupto-philist."

"The Big Baboon is found upon The plains of Cariboo: He goes about with nothing on (A shocking thing to do). But if he dressed respectably And let his whiskers grow, How like this Big Baboon would be To Mister So-and-so!"

"When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a LITTLE tail behind, So LARGE a trunk before."

"I shoot the Hippopotamus With bullets made of platinum, Because if I use leaden ones His hide is sure to flatten 'em."

"[M]others of large families (who claim to common sense) Will find a Tiger well repay the trouble and expense."

"The world is full of double beds And most delightful maidenheads, Which being so, there’s no excuse For sodomy or self-abuse."

"It was my shame, and now it is my boast, That I have loved you rather more than most."

"Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!"

"I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."

"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

"How did the party go in Portman Square? I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there. And how did Lady Gaster's party go? Juliet was next me and I do not know."

"I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme. But money gives me pleasure all the time."

"It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them."

"Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have left the vulgar stuff alone."

"Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative."

"Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not."

"I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed."

"I want so much to cling to something solid and steady."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted 'always remember to rely on yourself … if you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.'"

"Greene, we agreed, is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pursue conflict without."

"Graham Greene is unique-a questing lucidity that no other writer in the English language can come near. Why hasn't he got the Nobel Prize? We have all learned so much from him, as writers and readers."

"At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship."

"Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed."

"Under my cloak, a fig for the King!"

"There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost"

"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."

"It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death."

"Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong."

"Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted."

"It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten."

"God...created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution."

"I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate."

"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."