1. “Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”
2. “At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.”
3. ”Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It islike the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all."
4. “But loving-kindness is not coloured with that transitoriness which is the irremediable defect of love. It is true that it is not entirely devoid of the sexual element. It is like dancing; one dances for the pleasure of the rhythmic movement, and it is not necessary that one should wish to go to bed with one's partner; but it is a pleasant exercise only if to do so would not be disgusting. In loving-kindness the sexual instinct is sublimated but it lends the emotion something of its own warm and vitalizing energy. Loving kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists and makes it a little less difficult to practise those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline and tolerance, which are the passive and not very exhilarating elements of goodness. Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself.”
5. "Common sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers."
6. “Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.”
7. “Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
8. "Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."
9. “Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”
10. “I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.”
11. “If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.”
12. “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.”
13. "I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It has amused me to tell stories and I have told a great many. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia. In endeavor to bear my misfortunes with fortitude."
14. “I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.”
15. “Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”
16. “In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.”
17. “It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
18. “It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.”
19. "It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic."
20. “It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.”
21. "It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."
22. “It wasn't until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'.”
23. ”It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.”
24. ”I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.”
25. “Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
26. “Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”
27. ”Love is what happens to men and women who don´t know each other.”
28. "Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe."
29. "Most people cannot see anything, but I can se what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating."
30. “No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.”
31. “No professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. If he waits till he is in the mood, till he has the inspiration, he waits indefinitely and ends by producing little or nothing. The professional writer creates the mood. He has his inspiration too, but he controls and subdues it to his bidding by setting himself regular hours of work. But in time writing becomes a habit, and like the old actor in retirement, who gets restless when the hour arrives at which he has been accustomed to go down to the theatre and make up for the evening performance, the writer itches to get to his pens and paper at the hours at which he has been used to write. Then he writes automatically.”
32. “No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.”
33. “Only a mediocre person is always at his best.”
34. "People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
35. “Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.”
36. “Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.”
37. “She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
38. “She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.”
39. "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
40. “The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.”
41. “The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.”
42. ”The best style is the style you don't notice.”
43. ”The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.”
44. “The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”
45. “The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. Not the least of the evils of life, and one for which there is small help, is that someone who you love no longer loves you; when La Rochefoucald discovered that between two lovers there is one who loves and one who lets himself be loved he put in an epigram the discord that must ever prevent men from achieving in love perfect happiness.”
46. “The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.”
47. “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
48. “There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and the person which at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real me? All of them, or none?”
49. “There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action.”
50. “There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”
51. “There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”
52. “There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is there is very little about which one can be certain.”
53. “There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish; to bewail it senseless. . . With all my limitations, physical and mental, I have been glad to live. I would not live my life over again. There would be no point in that. Nor would I care to pass again through the anguish I have suffered. . . The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening.”
54. “There's no one so transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.”
55. “There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.”
56. ”The summer came upon the country like a conquerer. Each day was beautiful. The sky had an arrogant blue which goaded the nerves like a spur.”
57. “The tragedy of love is not death or separation… The tragedy of love is indifference.”
58. “The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.”
59. “Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge.”
60. “Tolerance is only another name for indifference.”
61. “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”
62. “Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.”
63. “We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
64. “We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.”
65. “When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.”
66. “When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.”
67. ”When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.”
68. ”You can´t learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.”
