Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.
The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.
In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet.
I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.
Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.