Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.
Women rule the world. I assure you we can’t bear mediocrities. We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
Nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.
When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money
I don’t want to earn my living, I want to live.
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.
To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.
Before Turner there was no fog in London.
When Christ says ‘Forgive your enemies’, it is not for the sake of the enemy but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because Love is more beautiful than Hate.
In married life three is company and two is none.
It is strange,’ the bird said. ‘It is very cold, but I feel quite warm.’
‘That is because you have done a good thing,’ said the prince.
Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion – a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
Form is everything. It is the secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.
Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trails are often blessings in disguise.
If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.
