Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I fell that...

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

A man’s work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation...

And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as...

For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times...

To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.

I don’t think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I’m sure it’s very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at...

Benevolence is often very peremptory.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he...

You’re beginning to dislike me, aren’t you? Well, dislike me. It doesn’t make any difference to me now.

He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.

I hate you. I wish you was dead.”Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely that it gave her quite a start. She had nothing to say. She sat down in her husband’s chair; and...

He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even,...

Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?’The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly.Oh, my dear, it’s rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says...

… I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt...

I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Writing is the supreme solace.

I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling.

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The...

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all...

He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture,...

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they’ve discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction — the wisecrack.

I’ve been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount...

And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They...

I could have forgiven it if he’d fallen desperately in love with someone and gone off with her. I should have thought that natural. I shouldn’t really have blamed him. I should have thought he...

…He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: “Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors;...

Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of...

How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere […] Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the...

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company...

It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can...

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled...

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo...

They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common...

The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can’t get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of...

She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but...

What d’you suppose I care if I’m a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn’t waste my time with a vulgar slut like you.

He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forebode to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather...

For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue...