Quotes by Novelists - Page 5

Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.
Anthony Trollope
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Honoré de Balzac
Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.
Muriel Spark
For inside all the weakness of old age the spirit God knows is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
George Sand
People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.
Edna Ferber
Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which from time to time reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
Luigi Pirandello
To succeed is nothing-it's an accident. But to feel no doubts about oneself is something very different: it is character.
Marie Leneru
It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.
Charles Dudley Warner
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
J. A. Froude
The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese
Life I fancy would very often be insupportable but for the luxury of self-compassion.
George R. Gissing
I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.
Edna Ferber
I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
Individualism is rather like innocence there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
Blessed are they who heal us of self-despisings. Of all services which can be done to man I know of none more precious.
William Hale White
A show of envy is an insult to oneself.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Egotism: the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
George Higgins
What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.
Thomas Mann
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
George Santayana
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
George Henry Lewes
O Caledonia! stern and wild Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood Land of the mountain and the flood Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!
Walter Scott
Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
Benjamin Disraeli
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions envy is only moved to malice.
Honoré de Balzac
Without heroes we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.
Ayn Rand
Nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.
Benjamin Disraeli
Every true man sir who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants lives so as to give a meaning and a value to his own life.
Luigi Pirandello
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the human interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese
We are betrayed by what is false within.
George Meredith
Truth has beauty power and necessity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
All reformers are bachelors.
George Moore
When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance his colleagues generally present him with a watch.
R.C. Sherriff
Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown land mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.
Benjamin Disraeli
My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
W Somerset Maugham
Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
Luigi Pirandello
It's funny but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune and you never know when it will befall you.
Thomas McGuane
What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities of having a patient but restless mind of sacrificing one's ease or vanity of uniting a love of detail to foresight and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
Charles Victor Cherbuliez
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound Tokens of love and hate black sorcery stones.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.
Thomas Mann
You too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today since like that of yesterday it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
Luigi Pirandello
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.
Gabriel García Márquez
In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.
James Jones
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli
Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
George Santayana
Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.
James Dickey