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One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
Sep 10, 2025
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.
He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.
There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule.
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
Rigorously investigated and fearlessly reported, A Crime So Monstrous is a passionate and thorough examination of the appalling reality of human bondage in today's world. In his devastating narrative, Ben Skinner boldly casts light on the unthinkable, yet thriving, modern-day practice of slavery, exposing a global trade in human lives. The abuses detailed in these pages are repugnant, but there is hope to be found: by giving voice to the victims, Skinner helps restore their dignity and makes crucial strides toward closing this shameful chapter in history.
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.
I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.
Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come into contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him - that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
We have abolished human bondage because it cursed those who imposed it. It is now our bounden duty to oppose cruelty to those creatures of our common Father which share with man the mystery of life.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.
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