He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague . . . He saw what looked like the...

The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.

Its like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he’s bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn’t got? I never...

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

… self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may...

I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that...

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from...

She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. “You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you....

…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.

The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.

It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art....

To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.

She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved...

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always...

Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.

How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with...

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him...

Unless love is passion, it’s not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.

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...