Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.
'Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.
Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.
They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.
Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.
Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.
There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.
In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.
Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
'A friend,' he repeated, sentimental suddenly. 'Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can't really happen outside sleep.'