“The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some subtle way that you recognize their importance, and recognize it sincerely.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 72 of 303
“Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.”
“Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.”
“Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.”
“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.”
“Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one's knowledge or one's taste.”
“Little said is soon amended. There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.”
“Don't lie, but don't tell the whole truth.”
“You know, one of the things I think you understand as president is you're held responsible for everything, but you don't always have control of everything, right?”
“You're not going to be able to make good decisions without building some relationship of trust between yourself and community.”
“Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!”
“I dared not trust the case on the presumption that the court knows everything. In fact, I argued it on the presumption that the court didn't know anything.”
“On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.”
“Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that.”
“In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.”
“Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.”
“Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.”
“Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."”
“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”
“The character of a woman rapidly develops after marriage, and sometimes seems to change, when in fact it is only complete.”