All Quotes

"I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet."

"Observing these people I am no longer surprised that there is such a scarcity of domestic servants back home."

"He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense."

"You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."

"Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."

"I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world."

"Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure."

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

"There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent."

"It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late."

"I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice."

"Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner."

"There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed."

"Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life."

"Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens."

"When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me."

"It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."

"But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved."

"There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved."

"It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic."

"He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands."

"The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."

"D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children."

"He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it."

"It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories."

"The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away."

"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."

"Impropriety is the soul of wit."

"I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life."

"I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen."

"I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate."

"Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation."

"Whatever anguish she suffered she concealed. She saw shrewdly that the world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willingly avoids the sight of distress."

"She was making money. But she could not get over the idea that to earn her living was somewhat undignified, and she was inclined to remind you that she was a lady by birth."

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."

"I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present."

"Life isn't long enough for love and art."

"The poignancy which all beauty has."

"I am a little shy of any assumption of moral indignation. There is always in it an element of self-satisfaction which makes it awkward to anyone who has a sense of humour."

"One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly."

"We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us."

"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge."

"“A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her,” he said, “but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.”"

"Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem."

"Self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy."

"He made one laugh sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease to amuse if it were commonly practised."

"Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history."