Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

The image of the “presence,” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go–this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty...

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.

The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large...

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one...

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn’t notice: he liked–oh this he did like, and above all in the...

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.

If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the...

Though I couldn’t make out what she was talking of I was terribly frightened; the absence of a clue gave such a range to one’s imagination.(“Sir Edmund Orme”)

The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

Nothing is my last word on anything.

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we...

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of...

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp...

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the...

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy… what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions...

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will...

The American girl isn’t ANY girl; she’s a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well...

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing...

I never did anything in life to anyone’s imagination.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going....

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it’s process.

You think too much.”I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches–a...

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the...

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones – the really clever ones –...

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straightway to see her.