There are moments when one is more ashamed of what is called culture than any one can ever be of ignorance. - E. V. Lucas

Unhappily in England just now,...the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to be the least sagacious and the least independent.

I don't want to give it to you, so please take it quickly and hide it, or I shall ask for it back. It is a very sordid feeling, I admit; but if you also had the collector's temperament you would know that to give away anything is nearly an impossibility, and to give away anything without regretting it is quite an impossibility.

It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page.