Quotes by Novelists - Page 15

Have the courage of your desire.
George R. Gissing
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves or on whom she simply depends is want of courage.
Joseph Conrad
If the word frankly or sincerely is not uttered in the first ten minutes-or let us speak openly-then you are not in the presence of a genuine businessman and he will certainly go bankrupt.
Francoise Mallet-Joris
Facing it-always facing it-that's the way to get through. Face it!
Joseph Conrad
Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world always yields or if it beats you sometimes dare it again and it will succumb.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Audacity has made kings.
Prosper Jolyot de Crebillion
Valour lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
Cervantes
The guts carry the feet not the feet the guts.
Cervantes
I believe in the gods. Or rather I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us I believe they are completely absent-minded.
Jean Giraudoux
Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity never of the correctness of a belief.
Arthur Schnitzler
Inconsistency is the only thing in which men are consistent.
Horace Smith
Speech is civilization itself.
Thomas Mann
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W Somerset Maugham
The only incorruptible thing about us.
Henry Fielding
It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.
Sir Walter Scott
[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions but there is always something left over mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.
Muriel Spark
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
W Somerset Maugham
Nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.
Benjamin Disraeli
The secret of living is to find a pivot the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.
Luigi Pirandello
More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
Benjamin Disraeli
Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever.
Charles Kingsley
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
George Santayana
Man is not the creature of circumstances Circumstances are the creatures of men.
Benjamin Disraeli
The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances.
Walter Scott
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
George Santayana
Christianity is completed Judaism or it is nothing.
Benjamin Disraeli
His Christianity was muscular.
Benjamin Disraeli
Our charity begins at home And mostly ends where it begins.
Horace Smith
Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself anything goes.
Ayn Rand
You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself one.
James A. Froude
Every one is as God made him and oftentimes a good deal worse.
Cervantes
Individualism is rather like innocence there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
He has not a single redeeming defect.
Benjamin Disraeli
The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.
George Sand
The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again.
Charles Kingsley
Change is inevitable in a progressive society. Change is constant.
Benjamin Disraeli
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
Variety is the soul of pleasure.
Aphra Behn
Every man even the most blessed needs a little more than average luck to survive this world.
Vance Bourjaily
belongs anywhere even the Rocky Mountains are still moving.
George Bowering
He wants to be different from everyone else and daydreams of winning the global race Parents unmarried and living abroad relatives keen to bag the estate schizophrenia not excluded will he learn to grow up before it's too late?
Earle Birney
I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates.
Leonard Cohen
People will buy anything that's one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
Cutting honest throats by whispers.
Walter Scott
Boredom is the most horrible of wolves.
Jean Giono
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
William Dean Howells
The man who suspects his own tediousness has yet to be born.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from... human souls we never saw... And yet these arouse us terrify us teach us comfort us open their hearts to us as brothers.
Charles Kingsley
Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me but that of books most of all.
William Dean Howells
If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on appreciation causes you to linger.
William Gerhardie
The delight of opening a new pursuit or a new course of reading imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.
Benjamin Disraeli
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy it lasts when all other pleasures fade.
Anthony Trollope
O thrush your song is passing sweet But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.
William Morris
Those evening bells! those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells!
George Moore
He that climbs a ladder must begin at the first round.
Walter Scott
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Honoré de Balzac
Beauty is power a smile is its sword.
Charles Reade
Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
W Somerset Maugham
Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham