Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so...

Yet magic is no more the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their...

We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional...

As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.

One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.

You’ve been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to...

I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never...

The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.

…it is well known that to praise someone whose rivalry you do not dread is often a very good way of putting a spoke in the wheel of someone whose rivalry you do.

Why did you look at the sunset?’Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy.

El arte es la naturaleza vista a traves de una personalidad

He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.

Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world’s confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so...

He had not even the self-complacency that enables stupid people to accept their mediocrity with unction; he had on the contrary an engaging modesty.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful;...

Perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington...

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.

I know that you’re selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven’t the nerve of a rabbit, I know you’re a liar and a humbug, I know that you’re utterly contemptible. And the...

No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are...

Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.

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...