Quote collection
442 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it."
"It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is... to live forever."
"And every day when I've been good, I get an orange after food."
"The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget."
"O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
"To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto."
"All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age."
"Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly."
"Nothing made by brute force lasts."
"A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure."
"To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artis en life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor."
"We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march."
"If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife"
"Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth."
"Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal."
"To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing."
"Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety, and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temparate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another."
"The essence of love is kindness."
"A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind."
"Money alone is only a mean; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich man can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see.... The purse may be full and the heart empty. He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him ... he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher."