Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men’s. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will...

It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him...

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.

There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple’s corridors; she does not know herself. ‘I can endure lies,’ she cries. ‘I cannot...

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I...

Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant;...

Listen, you are no longer a boy. You are forty. When will you learn not to wait for chance but to build on what you have and use each day to consolidate your position? Why...

How queerly they dress!

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young.And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t...

Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It’s your combination sinners – your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards – who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.

Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I...

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is...

It is only dogs that never bite their masters.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

So – people a thousand years from now…This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love — I scarcely dare say it —...

The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to...

It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped...

She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.

Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

They had been brought up to think that the domestic virtues were self-evident and universal; they had been starved of the knowledge that most attracts the young mind: that the crown of life is the...

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even...

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation...

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it...

Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have...

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of...

[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that...

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking… and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful...

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about...

Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.

Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.

The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have...

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (…) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.