Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

[Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man: he loves to see him work.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

We live, as we dream, alone

Strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

A word carries far -- very far -- deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our grieves... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

How does one kill fear, I wonder How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by the spectral throat

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men.

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of illusions.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more --the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort --to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires --and expires, too soon, too soon --before life itself.

As to honor -- you know -- it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

For the great mass of mankind, the only saving grace needed is a steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart for the short moment of each human effort.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams -- Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

Conrad Hilton was very generous to me in the divorce settlement. He gave me 5, 000 Gideon Bibles.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Going home must be like going to render an account.