The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.
Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.
Of what shall we be proud of if we are not proud of our friends?
Am I no a bonny fighter?
Life is not a matter of holding good cards.
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky; It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by; For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat, With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Don’t ever confuse motion with progress.
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.
It takes hard writing to make easy reading.
If they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed.
I smoke a pipe abroad, because To all cigars I much prefer it, And as I scorn you social laws, My choice has nothing to deter it.
O God! I screamed, and “O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes – pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll.”
We fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of fear and pain.
The spirit of delight comes in small ways.
The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.
To miss the joy is to miss everything.
When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that.
But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.
I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.
I hate to write, but I love to have written.