Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that.
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
I don’t think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I’m sure it’s very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.
I could have forgiven it if he’d fallen desperately in love with someone and gone off with her. I should have thought that natural. I shouldn’t really have blamed him. I should have thought he was led away. Men are so weak, and women are so unscrupulous.
Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part.
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.