The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they ca...
If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daug...
He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the...
But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd kno...
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
I have great affection for you, Roy I answered, but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
He had always had a passion for life and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself because he could not suffer the jos...
You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant acciden...
But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance,...
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.
Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon.
I guessed that he would have a passionate bedfellow that night, but would never know to what prickings of conscience he owed her ardor.
I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from ea...
He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out...
He did not like old people, and resented it when he was invited to meet only persons of his own age, and the young he found vapid.
He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; m...
They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate...