Quotes by Novelists - Page 7

If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!
Honoré de Balzac
Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Anthony Powell
Pain and pleasure like light and darkness succeed each other.
Laurence Sterne
Broad acres are a patent of nobility and no man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface it is 4000 miles deep and that is a very handsome property.
Charles Dudley Warner
The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Fear makes us feel our humanity.
Benjamin Disraeli
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
How does one kill fear? ... How do you shoot a specter through the heart slash off its spectral head take it by its spectral throat?
Joseph Conrad
Envy is the most stupid of vices for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
Honoré de Balzac
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Thornton Wilder
Envy is an insult to oneself.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
There is no greater glory than love nor any greater punishment than jealousy.
Lope de Vega
It is quite wrong to think of old age as a downward slope. On the contrary one climbs higher and higher with the advancing years and that too with surprising strides.
George Sand
The middle years caught between children and parents free of neither: the past stretches back too densely it is too thickly populated the future has not yet thinned out.
Margaret Drabble
Let us accept truth even when it surprises us and alters our views.
George Sand
Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before but in saying exactly what you think yourself.
James Stephens
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Joseph Conrad
The secret to success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
Benjamin Disraeli
Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an advantage.
Benjamin Disraeli
God forgives those who invent what they need.
Ayn Rand
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Thomas Mann
Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.
Benjamin Disraeli
I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
Time is a circus always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.
Carl Sandburg
A little space of time before time expires a little way of breath.
Algernon Swinburne
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
The moment we pass out of our habits we lose all sense of permanency and routine.
George Moore
Each day and the living of it has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
May Sarton
Happy the man and happy he alone He who can call today his own He who secure within can say "Tomorrow do thy worst For I have lived today."
Henry Fielding
Learn to drink the cup of life as it comes.
Agnes Turnbull
Let us savour the swift delights of the most beautiful of our days!
Alphonse de Lamartine
Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end the more tempting the minute.
Theodore Fontane
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just to enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
We shall never have more time. We have and have always had all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going. ... Concentrate on something useful.
Arnold Bennett
One hour of life crowded to the full with glorious action and filled with noble risks is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.
Sir Walter Scott
A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
Arnold Bennett
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
Cultivated men and women who do not skim the cream of life and are attached to the duties yet escape the harsher blows make acute and balanced observers.
George Meredith
To all to each a fair good night And pleasing dreams and slumbers light.
Walter Scott
The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.
Frank Miller
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
Thank God ever morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done whether you like it or not.
Charles Kingsley
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
Ayn Rand
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
There is something haunting in the light of the moon it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul and something of its inconceivable mystery.
Joseph Conrad
After a debauch of thundershower the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled.
George Moore
He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.
Stephen Vincent Benét
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept Remembering thee.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
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
I will sit down now but the time will come when you will hear me.
Benjamin Disraeli
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