I utilise all my spare moments. I’ve read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.
Death, as he had said, cancelled all engagements.
Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind?
The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him – some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.
From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.
He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.
I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster.
Oh,” every stair creaked faintly, “I ought to have been marble!
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes – possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.
If a man carry his sense of proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity.
Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system.
It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit – that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The.
Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand.
When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to its Elysee.
He had heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.
You wondered even when you heard that he was wont at Oxford to make without help his toilet of every day. Well, the true dandy is always capable of such high independence. He is craftsman as well as artist.
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost – he becomes just an unit in unreason.
You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.
Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called ‘the literary flavour’.
It is easier, as Michelet suggested, for a woman to change her opinion of a man than for him to change his opinion of himself.