Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.
There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.
She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.
I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.
A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.
Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.
It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.
There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.
I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.
The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain.
Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.
... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.
Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.
Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.
It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.
We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.
Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.
it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.
... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.
Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.
The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.
If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. I often have a suspicion that God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.
a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.
There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.