Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Those who prepare for war get it.
Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.
Everybody's tragedy is somebody's nuisance.
why haven't we seventy lives? One is no use.
Oh, time betrays us. Time is the great enemy.
I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.
The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.
no truth is strong enough to defeat a well-established legend.
[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.
What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.
Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Remorse ... is one of the many afflictions for which time finds a cure.
The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.
It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?
If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.
The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
the ruder lecturers are, and the louder their voices, the more converts they make to their opinions.
But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence
it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.
I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow.
There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.
Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.
A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.
The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!
Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.
What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.
This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.
We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.
If you are rich, you have lovely cars, and jars full of flowers, and books in rows, and a wireless, and the best sort of gramophone and meringues for supper.
the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.
I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.
I am much perturbed by this business of sickness. Our bodies seem so easily to leap into the saddle where our minds should be. People who are ill become changelings.
Surely, if life is good, it is good throughout its substance; we cannot separate men's activities from women's and say, these are worthy of praise and these unworthy.
Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.
Teachers have power. We may cripple them by petty economics; by Government regulations, by the foolish criticism of an uninformed press; but their power exists for good or evil.
But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.
The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end.
All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!
Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool. ... Fate is certain; death is certain; but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.
The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.
we are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.
I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.
Sorrow and frustration have their power. The world is moved by people with great discontents. Happiness is a drug. It can make men blind and deaf and insensible to reality. There are times when only sorrow can give to sorrow.
Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet.
I find you in all small and lovely things; in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter, in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in the summer garden.
These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.