It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.
The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.
Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.
There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.
The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
Sherry, the civilized drink.
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
When married people don’t get on they can separate, but if they’re not married it’s impossible. It’s a tie that only death can sever.
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.
Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
In civilized communities men’s idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.
When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.