Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy ...
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it.
Chattering finch and water-fly Are not merrier than I; Here among the flowers I lie Laughing everlastingly. No: I may not tell the best; Surely, friends, I might have guessed Death was but the good King's jest, It was hid so carefully.
If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into...
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral b...
In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.
There nearly always is a method in madness.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
