“One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
“It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.”
“One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.”
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
“Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.”
“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”
“These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”
“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”
“Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.”
“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”
“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”
“We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”
“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”
“Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.”
“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
“Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
“Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.”
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”
“The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.”
“It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.”