[...] Pe măsură ce o să crești o să descoperi că primul lucru necesar pentru a transforma universul într-un spațiu în care să poți trăi este să recunoști egoismul inevitabil al omenirii. Dumneata ceri...
You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself if you don’t look out,
You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying.
You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
Wounded vanity can make a woman more vindictive than a lioness robbed of her cubs.
With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.
With infinite patience she prepared to snare and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the wor...
Why d’you read then? Partly for pleasure, and because it’s a habit and I’m just as uncomfortable if I don’t read as if I don’t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it wi...
When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back...
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I’ve got out of the book a...
What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
What on earth did you want with an early Christian sarcophagus, Elliot?To put myself in it, my dear fellow. It was of very good design, and I thought it would balance the font on the other side of the...
Well, Henry, if I were you I wouldn’t worry, said the lawyer. My belief is that your boy’s born lucky, and in the long run that’s better than to be born clever or rich.
We English have no very strong attachment to the soil, we can make ourselves at home in any part of the world, but the French, I think, have an attachment to their country which is almost a physical b...
Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the s...
Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
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.
To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death...
Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. Cleopat...
Though he believed implicitly everything he saw in print, he had learned already that in the Bible things that said one thing quite clearly often mysteriously meant another.