A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.
A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed – and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.
Be not another if thou canst be thyself.
To marry was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest – a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players.
You are like a fire: you warm me.
The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.
But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
To know all is to despise all.
He became an unimaginative woman’s creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.
Myself: But wasn’t the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?
How they chirped over their cups.