Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.
How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.
Charlie Rangel was writing laws on our taxes as chair of the Ways and Means Committee while somehow neglecting to pay his own.
Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds.
The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.
I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.
We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.
The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.
An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.
Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands.
In spite of Virtue and the Muse, Nemesis will have her dues, And all our struggles and our toils Tighter wind the giant coils.
This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.
Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness.
The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.
It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.
What are Americans still buying? Big Macs,Campbell's soup,Hershey's chocolate and Spam--the four food groups of the apocalypse.
It is better to go down on the great seas which human hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in ignoble anchorage.
It is through chance that, from among the various individuals of which each of us is composed, one emerges rather than another.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.
Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making.
Let echo, too, perform her part, Prolonging every note with art; And in a low expiring strain, Play all the comfort o'er again.
A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.
The English delight in Silence more than any other European Nation, if the Remarks which are made on us by Foreigners are true.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
It's strange to recall that America animated none of my youthful daydreams. I did not see a Hollywood film until my late teens.
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.
I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.
What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!
Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.
Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.