But every well has a bottom and finally your friend will come to the end of what he has to tell you:
Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere […] Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that...
At that bureau a lovesick woman in a crinoline, her hair parted in the middle, may have written a passionate letter to her faithless lover, or a peppery old gentleman in a green frock coat and a stock...
Ashenden admiraba la bondad, pero no le ofendía lo innoble. La gente le creía hombre sin corazón porque estudiaba más que apreciaba a las personas a su alrededor, e incluso de aquellos a quienes since...
Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.'Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hos...
And what is that going to lead to?The acquisition of knowledge, he smiled.It doesn't sound very practical.Perhaps it isn't and on the other hand perhaps it is. But it's enormous fun.
And thinking over the long pilgrimage of his past he accepted it joyfully. He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but now he saw also...
An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values....
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to gover...
A man thinks it quite natural that he should fall out of love with a woman, but it never strikes him for a moment that a woman can do anything so unnatural as to fall out of love with him.
Peace of mind: Thou shalt have it only, the answer seemed to come to me, when thou has ceased to desire it.
As we know, Christian charity has always been able to make allowances for a lot of good honest hatred,...
Hay cierta elegancia en malgastar el tiempo -repuso Ashenden-. Cualquier cretino es capaz de despilfarrar dinero, pero cuando uno gasta su propio tiempo tiene el placer de tirar una cosa que no tiene...
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
They threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after the ineffable.
They could keep order better than a foreigner, and, since they knew the grammar as well as any Frenchman, it seemed unimportant that none of them could have got a cup of coffee in the restaurant at Bo...
Iculous because at his age he had not enjoyedthat which all fiction taught him was the most importantthing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing thingsas they were, and the reality which...