LEONARD WOOLF

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.

You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.

You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.