The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma.
The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.
He’s the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in.
There is no generosity without sacrifice.
What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.
I keep a band of music in my ante-room,” he said once to her. “It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing’s going on within.
There are no themes so human as those that reflect the closeness of bliss to bale.
Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots.
It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.
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.