It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.
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As she came up to the arch Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone. She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillas identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them. 'Who are these, these ...?; She gestured with her hand.' 'These?' The man with the brush sounded surprised. 'The lost.' 'Men who died in battle?' 'No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in cemetries.' 'These are just the ... unfound?' She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes. When she could speak again, she said, 'from the whole war?' The man shook his head. 'Just these fields.' He gestured with his arm. Elizabeth went and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight. 'Nobody told me.' She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. 'My God, nobody told me.
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Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.
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There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
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How many fools does it take to make up a public?
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Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
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Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
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We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.
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The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.
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The person of intellect is lost unless they unite with energy of character. When we have the lantern of Diogenese we must also have his staff.
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Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
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Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society, we will have to live more or less on our own.
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A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
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My present post amounts to about 700 thaler, and when there are rather more funerals than usual, the fees rise in proportion; but when a healthy wind blows, they fall accordingly...
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Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.
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Alex Sebastian: Mother, mother. Mrs. Sebastian: Why are you up so early?...
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Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
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An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.
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No, if it was up to me every record would be brand new studio material but Atlantic records asked me to put out a full live record because my tour really did do well last year.
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Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent.
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If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
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Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.
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Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.
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An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?
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No law reaches it, but all right-minded people observe it.
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There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
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Conviction is the conscience of the mind.
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The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.
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The most wasted day of all is that during which we have not laughed.
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