"

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

"

... it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

"

It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their gene...more

"

look you, there are only two classes of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and f...more

"

... the idea that 'Life' contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.

"

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enoug...more

"

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are pow...more

"

And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some o...more

"

Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, sh...more

"

... they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations eith...more

"

... I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistre...more

"

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and ...more

"

So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.

"

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unk...more

"

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all o...more