One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Language is wine upon the lips.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.