While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.
A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.
The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.
No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.
It amuses me to weep for a dead man with eyes that once were his.
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.
That moving carcass does but very inadequately symbolizes you....a subtle and immortal spirit.
Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.
Now, but these three," cried Jurgen, "are the glory of Philistia: and of all that Philistia has produced, it is these three alone, whom living ye made least of, that today are honored wherever art is honored, and where nobody bothers one way or the other about Philistia.
Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
Patriotism is the religion of hell.
There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
There is, moreover, a sign by which you may distinguish Thragnar. For if you deny what he says, he will promptly concede you are in the right. This was the curse put upon him by Miramon Lluagor, for a detection and a hindrance. By that unhuman trait, says Jurgen, Thragnar ought to be very easy to distinguish.
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
No lady is ever a gentleman.
Nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses.
Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.
People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic.
People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
