Emotions and Feelings

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin—the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin—the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

The truly erotic sensibility, in evoking the image of woman, never omits to clothe it. The robing and disrobing: that is the true traffic of love.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

What is an obstacle in our loving men is the love they have for themselves, which is touchy, exclusive, inordinate, tragic. We could never love them as much as that.

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

A hush is over everything— / Silent as women wait for love, / The world is waiting for the spring.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste- souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

I had rather ride on an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them.