The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did...

It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way....

You can never know enough about your characters

Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And...

If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.

You cannot write unless you write much.

Aloof on her mountain top she considered the innumerable activities of men. She had a wonderful sense of freedom from all earthly ties, and it was such an ecstasy that nothing in comparison with it...

It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle...

The public are a lot of jackasses. If you yell and scream and throw yourself about you’ll always get a lot of damned fools to shout themselves silly. Just barnstorming, that’s what you’ve been doing...

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of...

When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.

Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters, and...

I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination.

It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation...

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like...

The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.

But that wasn’t the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn’t reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks’ thoughts. I’d known...

Dying is a dull, dreary affair. my advice is that you have nothing whatever to with it.

I had no illusions about you,’ he said. ‘I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved...

we do not write as we want but as we can

She says it’s really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.

Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming an universal rule of action for all men.

There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They’ve given up all for nothing. They’ve been cheated. They’re dupes.”Waddington reflected for a little while....

Melville, by his own account, spent four months in the valley. He was well treated. He made friends with a girl called Fayaway, swam and boated with her, and except for his fear of being...

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to...

I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows. I know little enough of myself:...

Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his...

A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.

I don’t see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,’ said Phillip. ‘That’s only a laborious form of idleness.’But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind...

In the first place it’s not true that people improve as you know them better: they don’t. That’s why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An acquaintance shows you only the best...

Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.

You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the...

Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.

Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?

Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him,...

Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.

On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet’s history; and as there had been a beginning of life...

The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance...

He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but no he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power...

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are...