Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Love's a disease. But curable.
Nearly all novels are too long.
When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.
It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.
One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.
Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.
The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?
Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.
Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.
You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.
One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.
Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.
the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.
To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.
Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.
The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.
The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.
Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.
I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.
Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.
miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.
Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.
One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.
Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.
Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.
A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.
So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.
Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.
If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.
Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.
what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?
Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.
Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.
Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.
Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.
Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.
The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees; there are no obstructing walls.
The superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual.