Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.
International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.
It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.
Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
I've never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.
Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.
The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.
Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.
I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them.
Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.
History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.
Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.
every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.
Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.
There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.
The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.
Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.
If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.