It's the same with clothes as it is with thoroughbred hosses and women—you can always tell them, no matter how they've come down in the world. And it's like that with boots too.This chap's boots hadn't been cleaned for days, but they were boots, and not holes to put your feet into, like most people wear.
... for my part, I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.
He forgot the words of the illustrious duke, who said, "I pay my lackeys to be insolent, to save myself the trouble and ridicule of being so."
.. but with a power of silence that was more comforting than speech.
One o' these days, you'll find yourself in a better land like the snuff of a candle.
Do I sleep? do I dream? / Do I wonder and doubt? / Are things what they seem? / Or is visions about? / Is our civilization a failure? / Or is the Caucasian played out?
He had heard that the world revolves, and decided to stand still and let it come round to him.
"You might think of me." "I thought you were doing that."
Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
...for every one in the town was ready to look after her as being an idiot, and so specially dear to God.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
For men stand, as it were, at different heights, each seeing from his own level, so what the beggar thinks is heaven, the millionaire regards as nothing and what the millionaire pursues, the saint or the thinker regards as a bauble.
I do not look at my face more often than necessary as a general rule, it shakes me too badly to see it.
It seems to me...that the cause of discomfort and strife is never that we are too near others, but that we are not near enough.
Only in his simple heart he would like to know in so many words what the commands were; and that is sometimes a little hard, for women like to be half understood before they speak, and the grosser intellect of man seldom more than half understands them after they have spoken.
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
[In your 20's] You're like, "I'm so embarrassed I don't have a new shirt for tonight." By the time you're 44, it's like, "If this is marginally clean, I'm good."
...art simply represents man's passionate desire to drag the truth out of life in half a dozen different ways. God does it for you in the country!
The seal of sin is settling on [his] brow. He looks healthier and less uninteresting.
Life was not given us to waste on gratuitous martyrdoms.
"I don't often do much thinking," said Rosamund. "It seems a waste of time."
Happiness,...not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour.
To have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power.
Marriage destroys the icing, but reveals the cake, and you can't live on almond icing any more than you can make a square meal of Turkish Delight.
But...still it is only a child; and I can't centre all my hopes in a child: that is only one degree better than devoting oneself to a dog.
Hate is very lowering, isn't it...?
There is nothing quite as effective as a noticeable rotundity for reducing the conscious ego.
...the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender hearted.
You're that green that the very cows would eat you.
...drudge don't sound so well. Call her a ministering angel instead, and it comes to the same thing.
The religion of kindness has no temples and no priests, but all the same it's not a bad faith to adhere to.
Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.
Those who persecute, to overturn religion, can scarcely pretend to more philosophy, or more liberality, than those who persecute to support it.
It was seven o'clock, the sun was setting, the sky was warming to its last loveliness of rose and amber, and amethyst, colours with names almost as beautiful as themselves.
Each time that she approached...they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.
I try twice as hard and I'm half as liked....And that's alright.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;But thinks admitted to that equal sky,His faithful dog shall bear him company.
Very. I sometimes buy a cheap copy and substitute the names of my pet enemies all through the Inferno wherever they will suit the foot. In that way I get all the satisfaction the author got by putting his friends in hell, without the labor of writing, or the ability to compose, the poem.
Women are very like religion - we must take them on faith, or go without.
Whatever heaven may be, there is no earthly paradise without woman, nor is there anywhere a place so desolate, so dreary, so unutterably miserable that a woman cannot make it seem heaven to the man she loves, and who loves her.
If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that some one at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.
Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man's mind; she indulges herself and makes a few honest folk now and again....
She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded, by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instruction.
I noticed...that when they had swallowed a certain amount of information they held up their heads much like fowls after drinking.
His researches into the world of men had been too devastating for a mind which, though superior in quality, was immature and delicate. But the wild had cleansed him, healed him, brought him to sanity again. He could now put /Homo sapiens/ at arm's length for study and appreciation. And he saw that, though no divinity, the creature was after all a noble and even a lovable beast, indeed the noblest and most lovable of them all; nay further, that its very repulsiveness lay in its being something more than beast, but not enough more. A normal human being, he now ungrudgingly admitted, was indeed a spirit of a higher order than any beast, though in the main obtuse, heartless, unfaithful to the best in himself.
But existence is an awful grandeur and delight.
I am an old bachelor; not very far from fifty, in fact; old enough, at all events, to be able to take pleasure in watching without sharing; yet ready, notwithstanding, when occasion offers, to take any necessary pat in what may be going on, I am able, as it were, to sit quietly alone, and look down upon life from a second-floor window, delighting myself with my own speculations...yet...I am not the last to rush down stairs and into the street, upon occasion....
How weary she would find it to walk alone down the long paths of old age! how hard it was to be deprived of a dear arm on whose support she had reckoned for when "the slow dark hours begin"!
I tell you, sirrah, I have been in love, and I have been jilted - jilted, sir! and when I was jilted, I thought the jilting itself quite enough, without improving the matter by getting myself buried, dead or alive.
...we should never, I say, revile Fortune, for just at that moment when she appears to have deserted us, she may be only gone away to seek some richest treasure to bring back with her.
He always had time—time to talk and to read, time to wonder quietly, time to listen to those who valued his listening, time to rephrase his pedantries for those who found them arduous in the original.
The two words, 'Hope on,' are ever beating to and fro in my brain, like the tickings of that clock, and sometimes I persuade myself that the time-piece says, 'Hope on, hope on.'
She will become famous. What shame and misery!
That [he] was one of those...which are apt to exercise an uncanny influence over the weak and the foolish folk with whom they come in contact, - the kind of creature for whom it is always just as well to keep a seasoned rope close handy.
The horse is a closely sympathetic beast, and will make his turns, and do his trottings, and comport himself generally in strict unison with the pulsations of his master's heart. When a horse won't jump it is generally the case that the inner man is declining to jump also, let the outer man seem ever so anxious to accomplish the feat.
but gardeners, as a class, are a profane people.
"I don't know," he said, "that I have any particular objection in detail to your excellent scheme of Government. My only objection is a quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a toad in a ditch."
How tenfold sorrowful are our sorrows when borne in solitude!
one thing I am clear and sure about is this that Jesus Christ was not equal to His father.
...but after all, it is only prettiness that requires a dimple: full-blown beauty wants no such adventitious aid.
The darker forms of superstition, like lower organisms, are more tenacious of life....
There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives.
If there be courage and mental activity, and no conscience, we have a very dangerous devil.
For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never.
I was then five-and-twenty, - that was a sufficient indication that I had a past....
I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.
Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?
It has been said there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice upon a dark night.
The LORD said to the prophet Elijah, "Have you noticed how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Since he has done this, I will not bring disaster on him during his lifetime; it will be during his son's lifetime that I will bring disaster on Ahab's family."
Barrant reflected that women resembled horses in value. The mettlesome showy ones were bred to display their paces for rich men only. Serviceable hacks, warranted to work a lifetime, could not be expected to be ornamental as well as useful. So long as they pulled their burdens without jibbing overmuch, one had to be content.
At nine years old, Christian was a little rag of a girl; a rag, but imbued with the spirit of the rag that is nailed to the mast, and flaunts, unconquered, until it is shot away.
God gives us the tools and the courage, but we have to do the work ourselves.
St. Patrick was a gentleman
We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.
It was arranged on the plan of many college libraries, with tall, projecting bookcases forming deep recesses of dusty silence, fit graves for the old hates of forgotten controversy, the dead passions of forgotten lives.
If I harmed you in any way,...I regret not doing a whole lot more of it.
As long as we have a spark of commonsense left, we are not really in love.
An enterprising advertiser asks, "What is more terrible than war?" We answer unhesitatingly, oranges in the hands of young children.
He submitted to the force of events as a cabbage-leaf submits to the teeth of a rabbit.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves...if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.
From this moment I hate and despise him. Tell him I am willing to be his wife.
[He] was a gentleman and an officer, and of course an honourable man; but somehow I should not have liked to buy a horse from him.
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
Miss Cynthia was a nigger once, and oh, the trouble she had.
I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason.
Manure your garden: and marry if you dare.
The first room, with a large, dilapidated stove and two dirty windows, has a black measure for measuring the prisoners in one corner, and in another corner hung a large image of Christ, as is usual in places where they torture people.
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.