It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Love had a thousand shapes.
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?