But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.
What is life but a series of inspired follies...
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
Shall I turn up the light for you? No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.
Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.
Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.
Morals are a luxury of the rich.
Get out of my way; for I won’t stop for you.
A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.
Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.
The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.
Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
Life is like a flame that is always burning itself out...
It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.
When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.
I do not know what I think until I write it.