“I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.”

Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Our true passions are selfish.

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Far less envy in America than in France.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.

Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.

We had avoided discovery by the Sioux scouts, and we were confident of giving them a complete surprise.

There are two things which a man should scrupulously avoid: giving advice that he would not follow, and asking advice when he is determined to pursue his own opinion.

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.

We had avoided discovery by the Sioux scouts, and we were confident of giving them a complete surprise.