It is rare to come across anybody with very definite ideas; it is rarer still to meet a man and woman brave enough to put their ideas into practice. The hardest battle in life–and one of the longest–is the battle to live your own life. No one realises what fighting really means until they stand […]

You never really know anybody–until you have either lived with them, travelled with them, or drunk a glass of port with them quietly over the fireside. In almost every other instance, what you become acquainted with is one of a variety of masks! And everyone has a fine assortment of these, haven’t they? For the […]

If only the people who repeat the words of wisdom uttered by philosophers lived as if they believed them, how much happier the world would be! It is, however, so much easier to give, or to repeat, advice, than to follow it, isn’t it? Conventionality is far stronger than common sense, and a fixed habit […]

Too many fond parents like to imagine that their children know nothing at all of sexual matters–that they are clean and innocent and ignorant, and that, as long as they can be kept so, they will not run into danger and disgrace. But no parent really knows how much or how little their children know […]

Thus for the most part, things look most beautiful when we anticipate them, or as we look back upon them in memory over the fireside. For distance lends enchantment, not only to most views, but also to memories and love. As, metaphorically, we stand on the Mount of Olives gazing down at the city of […]

I often wish that we could all of us lead two lives. I don’t mean I wish that we could live twice as long–though, in reality, it would come to the same thing. But I would like to live the two lives which I want to lead, and only do lead in a sort of […]

But the various types of cranks always provide a psychological interest to the student of intellectual freakishness. There are the “cranks” you laugh at; others who make you wish to murder them outright. Then there are a few pathetic cases–elderly men, who bring their own little wooden box as well as the vast majority of […]

But I sometimes wonder if this indifference towards the facts which are “big” to so many people and ought, perhaps, to be “big” to everybody, be a sign of national weakness or of national strength. Personally, I longed, metaphorically speaking, to tear that female limb from limb and send that young man to a village […]

I often wonder what born tub-thumpers are like in their own homes. Perhaps they are as meek and mild as watered buttermilk. Thinking it over, I think they must be. No self-respecting woman could be tub-thumped at daily without eyeing furtively the nearest meat-carver. For the genius of a tub-thumper is that he is usually […]

Strange as the confession may appear coming from one who, week in, week out, writes about books, I am not a great book-lover! I infinitely prefer to watch and think, think and watch, and listen. All the same, I would not be without books for anything in this world. They are a means of getting […]

February is the month when, cold-red are the noses–and so (oh help!) are the “toes-es.” No one ever sings about February: scarcely anyone speaks about It. It is indeed unspeakable. Its only benefit is that, once every four years, it keeps people younger a day longer. If you’re thirty-nine, you’re thirty-nine for an extra twenty-four […]

Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which more quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact that her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that Satan finds some evil […]

Life is full of minor mysteries–conundrums of the everyday which usually centre round the problem: “Why on earth people do certain things and what on earth makes them do them?” And one of these mysteries is that of their choice in wallpapers. Of course some wallpapers are so pretty that it is not at all […]

They say it is better to be born lucky than beautiful. Which contains, by the way, only small consolation for those of us who have been born both lucky and ugly. For, after all, to have been born beautiful is a nice “chunk” of good luck to build upon, and anyway, if you are a […]

Beginnings are always difficult–when they are not merely dull. People worth knowing are always hard to get to know. On the other hand, people with whom you become friendly at once usually end by boring you unto death by the end of the first fortnight. People whom it is easy to get to know, as […]

The Boy Scouts have, I believe, a moral injunction to do at least one good action every day. Older people applaud that injunction wildly. It is so admirable–for Boy Scouts. They consider it to be so admirable, indeed, that they declare it should form part of the moral curriculum of every young boy and girl. […]

What is the happiest time of a man’s life? Not the attainment of his ambitions, but when the attainment is just in sight. Every man and woman must have something to live for, otherwise they become discontented or dull. People wonder at the present unrest among the working classes. But to me this unrest is […]

We have lots of ways of expressing that a man is in a “rut” without ever giving the real reason of our adverse criticisms. An author who has “written himself out,” an artist whose pictures we can recognise without ever looking at the catalogue, the “conventional,” the “dull,” the lovers who have fallen out of […]

The worst of keeping a “Family Skeleton” shut up in a cupboard is that the horrid thing will insist on rattling its old bones at the most inopportune moments–just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea the nearest local thing you’ve got to God–whether she be an “Honourable” (in her own right, mark you!) […]

“The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it since his mate was still […]