Quote collection
251 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded."
"The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions."
"All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground."
"To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed."
"The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take."
"It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry."
"There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting."
"Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!"
"do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever."
"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education."
"Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare."
"You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground."
"Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test."
"... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate."
"We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar."
"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality."
"Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions."
"Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so."
"Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea."
"One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces."