Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.
What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
The well dressed man is he whose clothes you never notice
It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, 'I don't know.'
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come into contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.
From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.
Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
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