Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.
Unhappy people are dangerous.
I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.
Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.
I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.
Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.
Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.
the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.
Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.
I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.
Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
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