“If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.”

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them..

Paris is a city of centralisation–and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point.

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer–both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.

Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? That the luckiest man who walks on this earth is the one who finds… true love?

The Dead travel fast.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.

And then away for home! Away to the quickest and nearest train! Away from this cursed land, where the devil and his children stil walk with earthly feet!

He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come, though afterwards he can come as he please.

I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome . . .

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?

Truly there is no such thing as finality.

The Stars are a long way off, and their words get somewhat dulled in the message.

I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths.

It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.

I do not, as you know, take sufficient interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions. Dress is a bore.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

I sleep seven hours. If I go to bed at two, I wake up at nine. If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at seven. I don’t wake up before – the house can fall apart, but I sleep for seven hours.

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

If you look at the democratic process as a game of chess, there have to be many, many moves before you get to checkmate. And simply because you do not make any checkmate in three moves does not mean it’s stalemate.