Quote collection
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace."
"Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it."
"The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer."
"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves."
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
"No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes"
"Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart."
"All extremes are dangerous."
"It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done."
"I prefer men to cauliflowers"
"The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire."
"Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself."
"I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street."
"Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will."
"Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently."
"To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"
"Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room."
"Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title."
"Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face."
"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."