Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.
I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.