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.
Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is o...
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 he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.
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 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, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs...
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...
Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
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.
Thing I've always noticed, people don't commit suicide for love, as you'd expect, that's just a fancy of novelists; they commit suicide because they haven't got any money.
They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective colouring of butterflie...
There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal af...
The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him.
The thought of my chief inspector reading The Waste Land filled me with pleasure. Suddenly he pushed a snapshot toward me.
The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.
The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults. The words of the dying God crossed his memory: Forgive them, for they know not what they do. CXXII
The new-born child does not realize that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by hi...