... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.
To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.
Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.
I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.
Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.
Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.
idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.
Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.
True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.
The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.
In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!
Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.
Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.
No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.
If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.
The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.
It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.
That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.
though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.
Borrowed illusions are better than none.
The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.
Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?
to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.
1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.
It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion
Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.
anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.
audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.
The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.
Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.
He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.
Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.
convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.
Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.
The suitable is the last thing we ever want.
it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.
there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.
Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.
I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.
I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.
What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.
Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.
To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.
The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.
He who demands little gets it.
The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.
Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.
... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.
... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
women love with their imagination and men with their senses.
Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.
The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent.
There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.
I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.
Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.
Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.
Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.
Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.
She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.
The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.
My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.
But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.
Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.
... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.
As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"
No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.
Theories have nothing to do with life.
The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.
America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.
What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.
There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.
It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment.
irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.
Happiness is a hardy annual.
. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.
You look as if you had lived on duty and it hadn't agreed with you.
It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.
Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.
Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.
What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.
He knows so little and knows it so fluently.
When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?
After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour
I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.
No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.
Cruelty is the only sin.
There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.
The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.
Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.
The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.
...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.
But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.
Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.
Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.
There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.
In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.
No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.
It is only in the heart that anything really happens.
It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.
It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.
a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.
The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.
I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.
First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.
After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.
