The more you know the more unhappy you are.
When you are successful you naturally feel more at home.
Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.
When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
Ah, one doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives UP one’s grandmother. They’re both antecedent to choice – elements of one’s composition that are not to be eliminated.
Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture – he was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas – he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the spell of his luxury wouldn’t be broken.
Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.
It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
Excellence does not require perfection.
And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.