Quote collection
213 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred."
"A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere."
"There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die."
"Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology."
"Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting."
"the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it."
"Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space."
"It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster."
"I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise."
"Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is."
"... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients."
"The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds."
"Unhappy people are dangerous."
"There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience."
"But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example."
"If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life."
"But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin."
"I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual."
"All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life."
"It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk."