Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future
Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.
A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.
They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.
We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.
There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.
There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.
I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.
The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.