"Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned." - John Galsworthy

This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that which not every one will admit is that this Creative Purpose works in its fashioning, not only of matter but of what we call spirit, through friction, through the rubbing together of the thoughts and the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet, the heat or friction within it, remains favorable to human life, there will be, there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of humanity, through the ever increasing friction of human spirits one with the other; friction supplied by life itself, and next after life, by those transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know as art.

"....Oh! isn't it stupid, the war?-as if it was not good to be alive."
He wanted to say: "You can't tell how good it is to be alive till you're facing death, because you don't live till then. And when a whole lot of you feel like that-and are ready to give their lives for each other, it's worth all the rest of life put together." But he couldn't get it out to this girl who believed in nothing.

When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died — but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.