Education for immediate effective consumption is more popular than ever, and nobody wants to think of the long term, or the intellectual tone of the nation.
Poor woman, I suppose she led a dog’s life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong.
It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.
People who have failed at Christianity aren’t likely to make great Buddhists.
Anna, who has always been devout, knows well that Despair is a mortal sin, and now she knows that it is a luxury, as well.
Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn’t, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?
But I can endure a surprising amount of midnight torment without being absent from class sharp at nine the next day. I suppose that marks me as something not quite up to the Byronic standard.
There’s the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.
Snobbery, like every other social attitude, takes its character from those who practise it. The snob is supposedly a mean creature, delighting in slight and trivial distinctions. But is the man who bathes every day a snob because he does not seek the company of the one-bath-a-week, one-shirt-a-week, one-pair-of-clean-drawers-a-week, one-pair-of-socks-a-week man?
The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.
I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
The paradox of money is that when you have lots of it you can manage life quite cheaply. Nothing so economical as being rich.
I don’t think Emily was quite up to the demands of being everything to Chips. Love lays heavy burdens on the loved one, sometimes.
I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two sides to him.
I have been very miserable since – miserable not for an hour but for months on end – but I can still feel that hour’s misery in its perfect desolation, if I am fool enough to call it up in my mind.
I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them – often in the same bed – a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.
Unhappiness of the kind that is recognized and examined and brooded over is a spiritual luxury.
The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years.
Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.
What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?