“There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.”

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.

You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.

Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

It hurts my head, but it’s fine because it’s something I do every day. You can’t avoid the gymnastics questions.

Rock bottom is a crisis. And everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what ‘crisis’ means literally is ‘to sift’ – like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there’s treasure left over. That’s what crisis does.

Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice.

People avoid action. Often because they are afraid of the consequences, for action means risk and danger. Danger seems terrible from a distance; it is not so bad if you have a close look at it

I dislike death, however, there are some things I dislike more than death. Therefore, there are times when I will not avoid danger.

Whether we get to avoid pain and suffering or we must persevere in the midst of it, our deliverance comes when we’re dragged from the enemy of our souls to the heart of God.