Lots of men hate women now-a-days. ... It was a man-made world, and now we're asking to go shares in the making.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

Things that happen, however painful they are at the time, do not matter very much for long. Only how we behave to them matters.

artists are exposed to great temptations: their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is a great danger.

A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.

Our responsibility to ourselves comes first -- because in a sense what one is oneself is the responsibility that one has for others!

I wonder how often not the intention but the desire springs up in a doctor's mind: 'Can I let this human being out of the trap of Life?

Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called 'common men and women' have increased it.

Personally, I think it's a good way to let a child start right in with the laws of Nature before he's old enough to be surprised at them.

A man whose every exertion is bent upon showing up the flaws in his wife's character must be at least partially responsible for some of them.

Curiosity is the only thing that really carries through time, isn't it? The creative curiosity, I mean, which fights its way into expression?

Every hen thinks she has laid the best egg! Can we not all believe as we choose? But the choice of others - what is that to us? Let them alone.

All persecution is a sign of fear; for if we did not fear the power of an opinion different from our own, we should not mind others holding it.

Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within.

I am never at picnics. The ground was not meant to be sat upon in its raw state, I feel sure, and I prefer my food without either caterpillars or drafts!

it must depend as much upon the patient's willingness to be cured, as upon the physician's skill in curing. There is neither force not magic in psychiatry.

She believed in letting children have a certain amount of rope, and only intervened at the last moment, in order to prevent their hanging themselves by it.

When a reserved person once begins to talk, nothing can stop him; and he does not want to have to listen, until he has quite finished his unfamiliar exertion.

Life was a series of messes, and one spent one's time cleaning them up; if one had any heart at all one also gave a part of one's time to cleaning up those of other people.

if you listen long enough - or is it deep enough? - the silence of a lover can speak plainer than any words! Only you must know how to listen. Pain must have taught you how.

To be a Jew is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, kind against cruelty

This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.

Taboos on the human heart are more dangerous than any risk we run by using our emotions. Sensation is the life of man; it is his actual energy. To suppress it is to lose creative power!

death ... is not a great affair! Think - it happens once only - to each of us - as birth does. What do you know about being born? that - and no more - will you know about the act of death.

Jane had that happy disposition which would like to imagine that every one really wishes the well-being of his neighbour and struggles, though sometimes rather disastrously, to help him towards it.

It is you men who make war! ... We, who have children, would never make it! Why should a woman be broken up in pain, to give her child life, only to see him carried away from her, to make food for guns?

Love comes into your being like a tidal wave ... sometimes it withdraws like a wave, till there isn't such a thing as a pool left, and every bit of your heart is as dry as seaweed beyond the wave's reach.

... what most people tell you a confidence for is to get something off their chest which hasn't really been on it. They don't necessarily want to hide the truth from you, but they're out to hide it from themselves

Human beings don't show, any more than cities at dusk, their real necessities! And yet if you looked -- past the circle of outside lights, through the street walls still standing -- into the want and emptiness within!

... most people are dead, and none of them seem to mind it. One hears a great many complaints about life, doesn't one? And there are people I know who would certainly grumble -- however dead they were -- if there were anything to grumble at.

That a Jew is despised or persecuted is bad for him, of course-but far worse for the Christian who does it-for although persecuted he can remain a good Jew-whereas no Christian who persecutes can possibly remain-if he ever was one-a good Christian.

Morale is not a single instinct. It has many ingredients. A sense of personal responsibility, the natural courage of an individual, the amount of his acquired self-discipline -- and above all his interest in others -- these together make up the spirit of morale.

The only creative power I know is that of what might roughly be called 'love'; not of course a sentimental love: a far more impersonal and less individual emotion. I sometimes think that migratory birds may have it for each other. They fly in the same direction, and have never been seen to interfere with each other's flights.

all daughters, even when most aggravated by their mothers, have a secret respect for them. They believe perhaps that they can do everything better than their mothers can, and many things they can do better, but they have not yet lived long enough to be sure how successfully they will meet the major emergencies of life, which lie, sometimes quite creditably, behind their mothers.

In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life --subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality --no human being's education can have a safe foundation.

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