Quotes by Novelists - Page 3

Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength his glory and his pleasure.
George Sand
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton
Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.
Thomas Mann
The time I've lost in wooing In watching and pursuing The light that lies In woman's eyes Has been my heart's undoing.
George Moore
The only joy in the world is to begin.
Cesare Pavese
Now or never was the time.
Laurence Sterne
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
Sir Walter Scott
O Woman! in our hours of ease Uncertain coy and hard to please And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made When pain and anguish wring the brow A ministering angel thou!
Walter Scott
Most men who run down women are running down one woman only.
Rémy de Gourmont
A woman never sees what we do for her she only sees what we don't do.
Georges Courteline
No woman marries for money they are all clever enough before marrying a millionaire to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese
The well of true wit is truth itself.
George Meredith
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.
George Santayana
All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness but with energy and above all with illusions I pulled through them all.
Honoré de Balzac
God bears with the wicked but not forever.
Cervantes
Welcome as the flowers in May.
Walter Scott
War hath no fury like a noncombatant.
C.E. Montague
Men love war because it allows them to look serious because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.
John Fowles
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
We are governed not by armies but by ideas.
Mona Caird
The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn you can't congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.
Gail Godwin
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg
My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air.
Thomas Love Peacock
Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edged rock of poverty.
Eugene Sue
If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.
Thornton Wilder
Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar and the drunkard who's the benefactor of a whole city.
Thornton Wilder
Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking just as ill health indicates a bad regimen.
Paul Bourget
The truth is cruel but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.
George Santayana
Time is precious but truth is more precious than time.
Benjamin Disraeli
True love's the gift which God has given To man alone beneath the heaven: It is not fantasy's hot fire Whose wishes soon as granted fly It liveth not in fierce desire.
Sir Walter Scott
True love is eternal infinite and always like itself. It is equal and pure without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
Honoré de Balzac
Travel teaches toleration.
Benjamin Disraeli
Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
If one had but a single glance to give the world one should gaze on Istanbul.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Travel is ninety per cent anticipation and ten per cent recollection.
Edward Streeter
A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore
Like all great travellers I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.
Benjamin Disraeli
Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann
The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
W Somerset Maugham
But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
I have the happiness of the passing moment and what more can mortal ask?
George R. Gissing
Life is not lost by dying life is lost minute by minute day by day in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
Stephen Vincent Benét
We do not remember days we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
What you think is an illusion created by your glands your emotions and in the last analysis by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp.
Ayn Rand
One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget
Honest Winter snow-clad and with the frosted beard I can welcome not uncordially But that long deferment of the calendar's promise that weeping gloom of March and April that bitter blast outraging the honour of May how often has it robbed me of heart and hope?
George Gissing
The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage hardihood endurance faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
Joseph Conrad
Do today's duty fight today's temptation do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see and could not understand if you saw them.
Charles Kingsley
If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
Morris West
The past is a bucket of ashes so live not in your yesterdays nor just for tomorrow but in the here and now.
Carl Sandburg
In the present every day is a miracle.
James Gould Cozzens
Happy the man and happy he alone He can call today his own. He who secure within can say "Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today."
Henry Fielding
Our life is like some vast lake that is slowly filling with the stream of our years. As the waters creep surely upward the landmarks of the past are one by one submerged. But there shall always be memory to lift its head above the tide until the lake is overflowing.
Alexandre Charles Auguste Bisson
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Living in the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles causes you to bump into people not going your way.
Edna Ferber
Ah tell me not that memory Sheds gladness o'er the past What is recalled by faded flowers Save that they did not last?
Letitia Landon
Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert