But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory–humorous, poignant, humane allegory–disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom...

This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

I wanted to get away,’ said she; ‘everybody wants to plague and worry me about nothing. They’ll be all right tomorrow. What’s worrying them?”They are sacrificing to our Canadian God,’ said Solly. ‘We all believe...

Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn’t need them for her destiny… It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive...

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you...

But in every church there are people who, for reasons which seem sufficient to them, do not approve of their pastor and seek to harry him and bully him into some condition pleasing to themselves....

So — I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have...

You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.

Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.

The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not...

Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless they’re very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldn’t underestimate the gratitude all men feel for women’s beauty. Men who...

One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.

Now I want you to remember something because I don’t think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however...

What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.

That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been—no, she had yielded because a man wanted her....

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor,...

You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game. Do you know Ibsen’s poem — To live it to do battle with trolls in the vaults of the heart and...

…so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm – might even be a patriotic duty.

Elsie, who had a lot of energy and no shame…she seduced me. It was not a success, from Elsie’s point of view, because the orgasm for women was just coming into general popularity then, and...

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find...

Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge…. Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a...

On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.

The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom,...

I wish people weren’t so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children….

To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again)...

In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had...

Need we go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking...

An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no...

The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height...

You’ll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you’ll never stop climbing.

And why should it not be terrifying? A little terror, in my view, is good for the soul, when it is terror in the face of a noble object.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.

Civilization rests on two things,” said Hitzig; “the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will...

I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link...

Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was...

But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.

I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.

He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.