I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it's there. I eat because that's what people do. And somehow when the food is put in...

Pretty dresses, desperate hearts.

Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.

The more flowery a person's speech … the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.

Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella - I think it was because Stella didn't want to be a lady of quality....

Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean... one can't be out in the cold all the...

Greatness is something which can be regarded in a number of ways, he said. It is, of course, the apotheosis, man raised to his highest powers, but it also can be, in a way, like insanity, a certain...

You don't trade in the devil you know for the one you don't know.

There is always a penalty connected to the things we desire most. It is isolation.

It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion {i.e. without any kind of relationship to the world} as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a...

See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.

There is a prospect greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer...

I am an inveterate buffoon, and been from birth up, your reverence, it's as though it were a craze in me. I dare say it's a devil within me. But only a little one. A more serious one would have chosen...

Good and gentle creatures do not offer a very stiff resistance, not for long, anyway.

The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

Is this what is called remorse of conscience or repentance? I do not know, and I cannot tell to this day. Perhaps this remembrance even now contains something pleasurable for my passions. No - - what...

People are made to torment each other.

I am sorry I can say nothing more to console you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in...

You mustn't ask too much of human endurance, one must be merciful.

After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the 'real life' we want. Give us something better in books.

It's good advice, but I expect it will be hard to follow; good advice is apt to be, I think.

People don't change . . . You just sort of have to take them like they are.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in...

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

For at every stage of your civilizations there are numbers of you who put aside selfishness and dedicate their lives in service to something they see as being greater than themselves. I say you may...

It's like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers they lose them with a vengeance.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.