Quote collection
101 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If we could only use other folks' experience, this here world would be heaven in about three generations, but we're so constructed that we never believe fire'll burn till we poke our own fingers into it to see. Other folks' scars don't go no ways at all toward convincin' us."
"A bird is joy incarnate."
"A book, unlike any other friend, will wait, not only upon the hour but upon the mood."
"The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course."
"Womankind suffers from three delusions: marriage will reform a man, a rejected lover is heartbroken for life, and if the other women were only out of the way, he would come back."
"There is a great deal of trouble in this world which is not caused by people keeping their mouths shut."
"the world has been fair cruel if you've never known the love of a dog!"
"Nothing in the world was ever built without a dream at the beginning."
"All we can do in this world is the thing that seems to us the best. We have no concern with the results, except as a guide for the future, and sometimes, years afterward, we see that what seemed like a bitter loss was, in reality, gain."
"As if by magic, the love of the many comes with the love of the one."
"when one has learned to wait patiently, one has learned to live."
"How strange it is that life must be nearly over, before one fully learns to live!"
"marriage is a great strain upon love."
"The spirit in which one earns his daily bread means as much to his soul as the bread itself may mean to his body."
"Content is a matter of temperament rather than circumstance."
"Those who have been made great have first suffered."
"When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names."
"[On marriage:] Someone once said that it was like a crowded church - those outside were endeavouring to get in, and those inside were making violent efforts to get out."
"Before, you think of it as a permanent bond of happiness; later, you see that it is a yoke, borne unequally. You marry to keep love, but sometimes that is the surest way to lose it."
"The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust."