“You are good for nothing unless you are clever.”

It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.

I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

Things are always different from what they might be.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .

In doing nothing men learn to do evil.

I asked, “What are words?” The tenzo said, “One, two, three, four, five.” I asked again, “What is practice?” “Nothing in the entire universe is hidden.”

There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster.

There’s nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody.

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

All this time i’ve hated myself for it. I thought i’d given it up for nothing. But if i hadn’t fallen, i wouldn’t have met you.