It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.
Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
We do not write as we want, but as we can.
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.
In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.
You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.
For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.
I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.
You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.
If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
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