Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other. |
Christmas... is not an eternal event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart... |
Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle. |
Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will. |
I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs. |
If we are strong, and have faith in life and its richness of surprises, and hold the rudder steadily in our hands. I am sure we will sail into quiet and pleasent waters for our old age. |
It is only the amateur [gardener] like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer. |
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond, since it deals with what one is and not what one has. |
Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future. |
On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light |
On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light |
One is so apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving se with the tide always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there: and I believe this difficulty in making allowance for the tide is the reason for half the broken friendships. |
Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us. |
Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn /the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness. |
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised. |