Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.
A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.
Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.
Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
Well money is not easy to describe. It is easy to lose but it cannot be lost, and no one can get really get used to it.
Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Animals in different countries have different expressions just as the people in different countries differ in expression.
That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.
I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
there is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.
The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.
You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.
There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.
I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.
She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
Men ... are so conservative, so selfish, so boresome, and ... they are so ugly, and ... they are gullible, anybody can convince them.
Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.
Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.
The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.
More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.
When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.
It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.
A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.
To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.
there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.
Some out of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a nuisance to them, a terror perhaps to them, a difficult thing to be forgetting.
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
A country house is not the same as a house in a country and a hotel in the country is not the same as a hotel in a town but is it in a small town.
I had a family. They can be a nuisance in identity but there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do without.
I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.
A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.
The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.
There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning.
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'