Quote collection
1K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution."
"It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue."
"There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail."
"There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men."
"Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!"
"Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust."
"It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes."
"I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting - so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions."
"The fact is, both callers and work thicken - the former sadly interfering with the latter."
"The bow always strung ... will not do."
"It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point."
"Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us."
"There's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, sometimes, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke."
"The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear."
"It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends."
"To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever."
"I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."
"Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity."
"Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses."
"I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."