Emotions and Feelings

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

Too great haste in paying off an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.

Of all crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude, especially when it is committed against parents.

Most people return small favors, acknowledge middling ones, and repay great ones with ingratitude.

Our gratitude to most benefactors is the same as our feeling for dentists who have pulled our teeth. We acknowledge the good they have done and the evil from which they have delivered us, but we remember the pain they occasioned and do not love them very much.

Our gratitude to most benefactors is the same as our feeling for dentists who have pulled our teeth. We acknowledge the good they have done and the evil from which they have delivered us, but we remember the pain they occasioned and do not love them very much.

Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man.

What a miserable thing life is: you’re living in clover, only the clover isn’t good enough.

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.

to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

But time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly, like a snake.

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.