I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
Don’t underestimate the value of irony – it is extremely valuable.
She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.
You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue – to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud – a missile that should never have reached you – and down you drop to the ground.
One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.
He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.
You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
Things are always different from what they might be.
No, no – there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see – what I don’t fear!
Keep making the movements of life.
Life’s to short for chess.
Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.
The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one.
The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people.