Quote collection
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world."
"Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely."
"Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement."
"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly."
"All extremes of feeling are allied to madness."
"Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having."
"Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others."
"What does the brain matter compared with the heart?"
"Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers."
"Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine."
"He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life."
"A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning."
"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things."
"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality."
"I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore."
"I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely."
"Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night."
"Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more."
"If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things."
"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."